A World Without Jobs

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Of course I’m sorry that Steve Jobs is gone. I enjoy Apple products as much as anyone. More important, he was far too young–56–and lived the kind of unconventional, multi-faceted, follow-your-bliss life we should all aspire to. In addition to an innovative genius, we lost a role model for walking the crooked path.

I expected the public outpouring of grief and self-pity we’ve seen in the media. (My personal favorite: the Onion’s short tribute, “Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies.”) And I wasn’t surprised that my husband, a diehard Apple fanatic and early adopter of all things technological except our vacuum cleaner, joined the many who changed their Facebook photos to:

But I have been surprised by how hard the kids I know have taken it. The editors of the high school newspaper I advise looked ashen, and set out to crash a story just ahead of deadline on student reaction to Jobs’ death. Indeed, the newsroom itself was a sea of Macbook Pros. “There are times in life when we wish we could hit Apple+Z and go back to the way things were moments beforehand,” began their eloquent editorial a few days later. “Wednesday night we felt that urge.”

My 16-year-old daughter said she was “as sad as I can be about someone  I didn’t know at all.” Scores of her Facebook friends changed their status to reflect his passing, and shared all sorts of photos and videos, particularly his much-admired 2005 Stanford commencement address. Some coped by making jokes, like “Guess an Apple a day doesn’t keep the doctor away,” or “When you’re Mac, you’re not used to things crashing. He didn’t see it coming.”

When I was 16, the only business titan I was even remotely aware of was Lee Iaccoca, whose products remained off-limits to me. (I knew about Walt Disney, too, but he had died when I was three, and in any case, his reputation for racism and anti-Semitism clouded his achievements in entertainment.) The most exciting innovations of my day were the Walkman and the Selectric typewriter with that white correction ribbon, but I certainly couldn’t have told you who invented them.

Today’s kids saw the Apple insignia about the same time they met their parents: it adorned the iPhones and iMacs that spread the news of their arrival and transmitted the first photos of them. Five-year-olds routinely ask Santa for iTouches, and whiny toddlers demand iPads to pass the time on long car rides. They’ve never known a world without  Apple; now they will be forced to know one without Jobs.

The 13-year-old son of a close friend perhaps summed it up best when he posted on his Facebook wall, “Thanks for my childhood. RIP Steve Jobs.” His mother was a little miffed; after all, she’s the one who bought him that iPad for Christmas.



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Magazines & Marriage

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

The middle school magazine drive ends tomorrow, and I have so far successfully managed to hide the forms from my order-happy husband. It’s not that I have anything against school fundraisers–well, wait a minute; that’s not true. I despise school fundraisers. What I mean to say is that I have nothing against helping the public schools in any way possible, as long as it does not involve attending a silent auction or buying 10 tubs of cookie dough. (I rather enjoy the gift wrap drive, though at this point we have enough to last 250 years.) Personally, I would prefer to write a big, fat check to the PTO at the start of the year, and be done with the whole thing.

But I am especially leery of the magazine drive because we are already drowning in magazines. We like magazines. My husband and I met and fell in love at Newsweek, where he edited my stories. (I figured anyone who could be so kind and gentle in tearing apart my copy would probably make a good husband, and father. I was right.) Still, enough is enough. As it turns out, my husband, who you may know as Mr. 70 Percent for his average completion rate on household tasks, scores a whopping 2,000 percent when it comes to ordering magazines. (His actual magazine reading rate is a bit lower, hovering around 12 percent.) In fact, judging from the piles stacked around our house, you’d never know there’s been a digital revolution. These are some of the magazines we presently receive:


That’s in addition to such standbys as The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, People, Entertainment Weekly, Wired, Fast Company, Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest, Bon Appetit,Wine Spectator, Business Week, Fortune, Boston and New York. I’m sure I’m forgetting 10 or 20. (We also still receive Newsweek, but we’ve agreed to let that one lapse.)

By hiding the catalogue, I figured, I heroically saved us from being inundated with such must-read titles as Good Old Days (“America’s favorite–warm thoughts of happy days gone by!”), Military Heritage (“The ultimate history of armed conflict, exquisitely illustrated”), Farm Show (“New products & ‘made-it-myself’ farm inventions”)  Predator Xtreme (“The authority in predator hunting. Bonus: Knight & Hale Lead Dog Call”), and the cryptic Tiny Titans (“All your favorite Titans, in their cutest possible form are here & waiting for you”).

But I forgot to take into account one important factor: he’s quite capable of ordering new magazines even without the middle school fundraiser. As I was navigating the piles of reading material and dirty socks on our bathroom floor the other day, I noticed an unfamiliar title sticking out: Garden & Gun (“A celebration of Southern lifestyle at its best,” according to the fundraising catalogue). I actually laughed out loud; we live in Massachusetts, for God’s sake. It felt like a Saturday Night Live spoof: could any two things have less in common? Running & Donuts, maybe, or Butterflies & Torture, as my friend Annie suggested? The ampersand is essential.

My husband became indignant when I started mocking him for subscribing to Garden & Gun. “It’s a great magazine!” he insisted. He should know.

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Make Room on the Mantle

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Apparently I’ve been granted a Versatile Blogger award, which sounds suspiciously like something a blogger like me (ie severely lacking in readers, impact and lucrative corporate sponsorships) would invent to boost her profile. The only reason I even found out about it was because the Versatile Blogger who nominated me sent a message letting me know–kind of like when the Nobel committee wakes up its prize winners with an early morning call from Stockholm.  Then I had to Google “Versatile Blogger award” to find out what it was. I’m still not sure. My friend Annie described it, astutely, as “a chain letter for bloggers.” High praise indeed.

But far be it for me to unvarnish a compliment, no matter how dodgy in origin. It’s sort of like believing in Santa Claus, or God: if you dismiss the concept outright, there’s no chance it will benefit you. But if you’re only skeptical, then you’re hedging your bets. You might in fact receive that new bike–or 10,000 daily hits–you’ve been dreaming of.

There are, I’ve learned, certain obligations that come with an honor such as this. First and foremost, I must express my gratitude to the wise and discriminating blogger who selected me: thank you, Lisa Tognola, author of the incisively funny mainstreetmusings.com.

I’m also supposed to bestow the “Versy” (as it’s known among us insiders) on other bloggers I admire. Many of these have no doubt won awards far more noteworthy, but you can’t help who you love.

Wendi Aarons
The Bloggess
Scary Mommy
Her Bad Mother
Free Range Kids
Aiming Low
Rage Against the Minivan
Manic Motherhood
Katherine Ozment
Linda Flanagan
 

Lastly, I’m supposed to divulge seven random facts about myself. Well, how versatile a blogger would I be if I gave it to you all in one post? If you want scoop, read the blog. It’s award-winning, you know.

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License to Run Errands

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

If you’re wondering why there are so many horrendous drivers on the road, I’ve got the answer: it takes exactly six minutes to pass a driving test. At least that’s how long it took my daughter–the one who, en route to the test, swerved around a turning car without checking her rear-view mirror.

This is what her test consisted of: first,  she had to roll down the windows, which wasn’t as easy it sounds because we were in a borrowed car. (In Massachusetts you have to take the test in a vehicle with a center emergency brake–presumably so the instructor can yank up on the handle if you veer wildly out of control–and she couldn’t immediately find the controls.) She demonstrated her hand signals; then, on the quiet roads around the RMV, she turned left, turned right at a stop sign, drove a block, parallel parked (with a car only in front), backed up 20 feet in a straight line, performed a three-point turn (even though the Mini Cooper she was driving simply could have pulled a U-turn), “secured the vehicle” on a slight incline (ie turned wheels toward curb), parked the proper distance in front of a fire hydrant, and stopped at a traffic light.

Just as I thought, “Now we’ll see how she does on a busy road,” the instructor directed her back into the RMV parking lot. Are you kidding me? I wanted to scream. Why don’t you ask her to change lanes? Navigate a four-way intersection? Merge into heavy traffic on a highway under construction? React to an urgently buzzing cellphone? Admonish her friends not to drink beer in the back seat?

But I didn’t. I was too busy thinking about all the errands I no longer needed to run and carpools I didn’t have to drive.

Even before my daughter had stopped the car and shifted into park, the lady was stamping her permit. “Congratulations,” she said. “You did a good job.” Pathetically, I teared up, which I realize is sort of a Pavlovian response to any rite of passage I witness in my children.

“Mazel Tov!” I said after the instructor left. She looked shell-shocked. “I’m kind of freaking out right now! Mommy, YAY, I just got my license!!”

I was kind of freaking out, too. But there was no turning back. “Do you want to drive home?” I asked. She didn’t. She had a lot of texting to do.

Courtesy of Allstate

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Like School, But Worse

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

“Nobody likes going to religious school,” I tell my youngest daughter whenever she complains about going to Hebrew school, which is twice a week. “It doesn’t matter if they have to go to CCD or Sunday School or a madrassah. Nobody likes it; it’s just something you have to do.” I am not certain this is 100 percent true, but I would put money on a 10 point margin of error.

Nonetheless, the complaining gets old. “It’s SOOO boring!” she’ll say. “We don’t learn anything! It kills the whole day.” Indeed, she has spontaneously developed all manner of mysterious illnesses on Thursdays around 3:15 and Sundays at 10:30 a.m. I don’t have much sympathy. I figure now that she’s in fourth grade, it’s time for her to suck it up and face the fact that life isn’t always playgrounds and popsicles, as hers pretty much has been so far. I mean, I do all sorts of things that I don’t enjoy–laundry, watching 8th grade football and making school lunches, to name a few; why shouldn’t she? But I also feel slightly wounded that she is so baldly rejecting the heritage that I bring to our family. (It’s bad enough that my son proclaimed himself “no longer Jewish” immediately following his Bar Mitzvah.)

So last weekend, when she started whining in the car en route to the first Sunday School class of the year, I tried a new approach: I played the Holocaust card. After all, I remember the one time I sat truly riveted in Hebrew School was in fourth grade when I learned what a concentration camp was. I tried to bring it up matter-of-factly: “It’s important for Jews to keep practicing their faith because a lot of people throughout history have wanted to kill us, just for being Jewish. Have you ever heard of Hitler?” She hadn’t. “Well, if we lived in Germany when Hitler was in power, we would be in a concentration camp”–I explained what that was–“or possibly even killed. We’re lucky we live here, and now. So you have to go to Hebrew School to keep Judaism alive. Plus it teaches you how to be a good person. Does that make sense?”

She shrugged in the back seat. “Sure,” she said, and was quiet the rest of the way. Maybe I had traumatized her, or maybe she was just thinking about all the outdoor fun she was about to miss. Either way, it seemed to make an impression. When we arrived at synagogue, she said she wanted to sign up for the youth choir–a first! And when she got home later, I asked, somewhat tentatively, how it was. “Good!” she said brightly. “We got candy.”

Take that, Der Führer.

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The Places Our Car Has Been

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

My husband and I tend to see eye to eye on the big issues that can make or break a marriage: politics, music, child-rearing, operating systems, sports teams. However, there is one area of dispute, religion and foreign films notwithstanding, that may yet prove to be our downfall: those ubiquitous oval stickers announcing in elitist acronyms the fabulous places we’ve vacationed.  You’ve seen them: OBX! KW! PEI! Aren’t we awesome and well-traveled! I, personally, find them tacky and inane. But my husband and kids love them and have plastered them all over the Thule carrier that rides atop our minivan.

I didn’t realize what I was up against until we returned from MV and ACK  (where, as  our car proudly proclaimed, we also visited SCNST) on Labor Day. Heading out to the grocery store, I noticed a new sticker on the back of the Thule: WT. It might as well have read WTF, because I had absolutely no idea what it was referring to. (The CHAPPY one, at least, made sense: we had weathered Hurricane Irene on Chappaquiddick.) “WT? West Tisbury!” my husband explained jubilantly, naming a Martha’s Vineyard town that I hadn’t even driven through during our week-long stay. It was as if the car and I had been on completely separate vacations.

ADK

I know my family sees the stickers as cheerful reminders of the places at least some of us have been. My husband has admitted, in fact, that my disdain is all the inspiration he needs to continue surreptitiously adding them. But I can’t stop viewing those ovals as badges of insecurity, transparent attempts to gain membership to an exclusive club—those who know that ADK means Adirondacks, for instance, or that HHI stands for Hilton Head. It’s really no one’s business whether we’ve been to THE BLACK CAT or THE BLACK DOG. And why would I want anyone to know I’ve visited B&J’s (that’s Ben & Jerry’s) in Vermont? They might accurately surmise that I was a willing participant in the consumption of a 20-scoop Vermonster sundae. It’s TMI, and no better than the bumper stickers that admit things like “This car climbed Mt. Washington” or–as the idiotic one I saw driving back from Hyannis over the weekend proclaimed–“I ♥ my selfish and ungrateful children.” Why would anyone be so proud of having selfish and ungrateful children that they would feel compelled to advertise it to irritated strangers sitting behind them in bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic?

The only sticker that I actually like is the one my friend Annie and my daughter sneaked onto our Thule as a joke once when I wasn’t looking: TLC, it reads, which practically no one will recognize as Tully Lake Campground, a beautifully rustic spot in central Massachusetts where we spent a few nights in a very proletariat tent.

I do not expect to win the sticker battle. Clearly, I’m outnumbered, and I certainly don’t care enough to tiptoe out after dark with a bottle of Goo Gone and start scraping away at VT and LP (Lake Placid). But I do wish my husband would get that damn Thule off the car already.


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A Family Vacation With Someone Else’s Family

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Bracing for Irene...

The biggest disadvantage of having three kids covering a seven-year age span is that it is virtually impossible to find a family activity that makes everyone happy. Movie night, for instance, means either the 9-year-old hides her eyes during Pulp Fiction or we all have to sit through Beverly Hills Chihuahua. When the kids were younger, I got around this little unforeseen glitch in family planning by instigating something called “Mandatory Fun.” I must have read about it in a parenting magazine, but it meant that the five of us took turns choosing an activity each weekend and no one was allowed to utter a single complaint–even if it meant spending a beautiful Saturday inside Chuck E. Cheese–because your turn was coming up soon. It worked beautifully for awhile, at least until our weekends started getting overrun with sports and birthday parties.

My husband and I also realized early on that the best way to survive family vacations was to avoid them altogether. We started going away with friends even before our third child was born. The first time I was nervous: we rented a house on the Jersey Shore with friends we loved but didn’t know terribly well and their three young daughters, who ate a lot of Cap’n Crunch. And though my kids–then six and two–discovered the joys of chocolate milk that week, I didn’t anticipate how much being with another family would divert them from whining, fighting and demanding I play Legos. I remember enjoying  a glass of wine on the deck with the other grown-ups, listening to the five kids giggle away as they choreographed a new dance, and thinking, “I am never going away without friends again!”

Mostly, we haven’t. I worry, occasionally, that this means there is something wrong with us. But mostly I rationalize it by convincing myself that we’re still together–just not alone together–and that fun with other people is definitely healthier than dysfunction on our own.

Trash Bag Sailing

The wisdom of this vacation philosophy became abundantly clear during Hurricane Irene. We spent the storm marooned with some dear friends on the Martha’s Vineyard island of Chappaquiddick after the Coast Guard canceled all ferries from Edgartown. We had a marvelous time. Though the wind howled alarmingly at moments, we didn’t get much rain and never lost power; the sun even peeked through now and again. Ten of us–six children and four adults–spent 36 hours alone together in the house. We ate well, read, held a core-exercise class, did jigsaw puzzles, watched episodes of “Glee” and played board games. The kids, in ever-changing combinations, played Monopoly, poker, penguin bowling, and “store.” They hit golf balls and attempted “trash bag sailing” on the giant gusts of wind. The two big girls teamed up in an online quiz to name the top 200 most mentioned Harry Potter characters. No one fought. No one cried. The only arguing came between siblings or spouses during heated rounds of Bananagrams and Pictionary. (“Money check? Money check?? What the hell is a money check?” my husband yelled at me when I couldn’t come up with “Paycheck” in time.) In fact, at several points during the day, different people remarked, “I love hurricanes!” or “This is the best hurricane ever!”

I couldn’t help but think if we hadn’t been with our friends, Irene would have been just the beginning of our vacation’s violent storms.


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There’s No Place Like Camp

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Usually when the kids arrive home after being away, we enjoy a brief honeymoon period: they are engaged, chatty, appreciative, helpful and pleasant. Not this time. My 16-year-old daughter returned yesterday after four weeks of being a junior counselor at a YMCA girls’ sleepaway camp–the very one I attended as a child 35 years ago–and she clearly was not happy to be home. She was unusually distant and short with us, though she was reasonably cheerful with her brother and sister.

I was surprised by how much her remoteness bothered me. Certainly it was out of character; usually she is open, sweet and communicative. Even when I tried to engage her by asking questions, she shut down. I asked her if she was irritated at me and she said, in an irritated voice, “Why would I be irritated at you?” Because I represent home and authority? Because I am not your camp friends? Because I still think of Camp Mohawk partly as “mine” and you think it’s entirely “yours”? Then I asked her if she was still in the “camp zone” and she said “Yes” before retreating to her room to turn up the music a little louder.

I distinctly remember the letdown of coming home after four liberating weeks at camp or–even more acutely–after a semester of college, feeling hemmed in by my parents’ rules, the thin walls of our house, the return to family routines and responsibilities. It should have made me sympathetic to my daughter’s homecoming experience, but it didn’t. Instead, I felt how I imagine my mother used to feel: unappreciated, extraneous, disconnected, annoyed.

I realized, watching “The Wizard of Oz” later that evening with my 9 year-old, that it’s all part of my displacement as the great and powerful wizard. She’s pulling back the curtain, not necessarily because of anything I did, but because she’s ready to. Being away from home makes you see your family in a stark, new light, and while that can make you appreciate them more, it also highlights their limitations–and your own strengths. I have begun to notice my competence outstripped by that of my teenagers in several ways, mostly involving technology. But even when my 13-year-old son and I hiked Mt. Washington a few weeks ago, I was surprised by how abruptly we had shifted roles: instead of my waiting for him and urging him on, as I would have done a few short years ago, he was the one waiting for me at every fork in the path and offering me his hiking poles when the rocks got slippery.

I have heard people say that the worst summer they ever had with their teenager was right before he or she left for college. This makes evolutionary sense to me: fighting over everything from curfews to laundry to car privileges is nature’s way of preparing both parent and child for the separation. I guess we’re just getting a head start.

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The Back-to-School Build Up

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

I love that old Staples commercial that shows a father gleefully filling a shopping cart with school supplies, kicking his heels to the strains of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” while his kids mope along behind. I, too, am always happy to see them go back, even though it means a return to the relentless cycle of activity–football, guitar, soccer, band practice, Hebrew school, homework, saxophone–that has come to define modern family life. Even so, by the time we get through preparing for the new school year, I’m already so exhausted and broke that I just want to put them on the bus so I can crawl back under the covers. The big hurdles of August:

1. Shopping for School Supplies: The Staples commercial notwithstanding, buying school supplies is a lot like The Amazing Race with mechanical pencils. Parents and kids clutching xeroxed lists mow one another down in hot pursuit of glue sticks and the correct color one-inch three-ring binder. The specifications are military-like: two pocket folders, no trapper keepers (whatever those are); 300 sheets white-lined, college-ruled loose leaf paper. For my son, a rising 8th grader, I could have ordered the supplies through the middle school in June–at a cut-rate price, too–but that would have required not losing the paper that explained what to do. At Staples, while I helped my 4th grader navigate the mind-numbing array of Post-It notes, my son collected his own gear. When he was about 90 percent finished, he realized he’d been following the 7th grade list, and had to put everything back and start over–providing excellent fodder for those who believe students regress over the summer and should go to school year round. At about this time every August, I begin to see their point.

2. Summer Reading: When that book list comes home in June, it appears so full of  promise–enchanting titles to be enjoyed curled up on the couch with a glass of lemonade, or stretched out on a towel between rounds of Marco Polo. Now it just seems like a prison sentence. Naturally, I have been nagging them for weeks to tackle the summer reading–“Just one chapter a day!”–so they’re not stuck cramming it all in over Labor Day weekend. Alas, the books sit, unopened, in a pile … somewhere. Of course it signals my failure as a parent: words are my life! My livelihood! How I met their father (he was my editor at Newsweek)! Yet only one of the three–the eldest–actually considers reading anything other than a chore.

3. New Clothes: When I was a kid, back-to-school clothes shopping was a revered late summer tradition that my mother and I shared with my best friend and her mother. It involved a day-long trip to Bloomingdale’s in Stamford, complete with lunch. But thanks to years of sweltering through the first few days of school in new woolen sweaters and skirts–in fall colors!–I know that my children need nothing new at least until mid-October. Their ratty old shorts and t-shirts will work just fine for the first few weeks. However, that doesn’t stop them–the girls, at least–from craving something new to wear. I understand that. Luckily, there is Old Navy, land of the colorful $6 t-shirts and $19 “Uggs.” As for my son, the only one who actually needs anything new–he shot up six inches in the past year and his feet have grown a full shoe size since May–“shopping” means pawing through a bag of clothes mysteriously deposited on his bed. The ones that end up strewn across the floor are the keepers; the rejects remain in the bag for me to return to Kohl’s.

4. Paperwork: Every year I get the exact same forms from each school–asking for phone numbers, allergies, doctors’ names, emergency contacts–and every year I fill them out exactly the same way. I know I complained about this back when I was completing camp forms (see “June is the Cruelest Month“) but couldn’t they just keep last year’s form on file, and ask parents to fill out a new one only if there are changes? Better yet, isn’t there some universal electronic version we could zap to every school? Also, August is not the time to inform me that the nurse will be conducting vision, hearing and posture screenings later in the year. It’s not like I’m going to start making the kids walk around with books on their heads, although I suppose that’s as good a use as any for their summer reading material.

5. “I’m bored”: No matter how many fun-filled weeks my kids have spent at camp, no matter how much swimming or ice cream or water balloon tossing or zip-lining they have enjoyed, there inevitably comes a time in mid-August when they start complaining there is nothing to do. I have little patience for this. I am not bored. I still have work to complete, errands to run, forms to fill out. My suggestions that they clean their rooms, organize their school supplies or read the damned book are met with snickers–“We want to do something fun!”–and succeed only in creating children who are both bored and irritated at me. But I know I’ll be vindicated when September 6 rolls around, and they realize they have only one person to blame for their failure to finish the summer reading. Then they’ll blame me anyway.

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Rattlesnakes, Spiders and Bears

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Oh my. My son returned home from a two week backpacking trip in the Blue Ridge mountains with some harrowing tales to tell, along with a smelly piece of freshly-killed-rattlesnake skin. A more anxious mother might have banned him from ever going on another trip with  Overland Adventures, a teen-travel company that organizes action-packed, bare-bones trips at Ritz-Carlton prices. But he came home so exhilarated, confident, motivated and cheerful that I’m re-upping him right now.

He and 10 other teens (including Uma Thurman’s daughter with Ethan Hawke) met up with two counselors in Charlotte, NC. The leaders, one male and one female, are the kind of preternaturally accomplished college students–athletes! tutors! community service volunteers! environmentalists! first responders!–that make tail-end Baby Boomers like me feel pathetic, old and obsolete. But they are definitely who you want accompanying your child on a backwoods hiking adventure.

Eastern Timber Rattlesnake; photo by Paul A. Selvaggio

Despite a fierce thunderstorm early on, the trip got off to a great start. They bonded as a group, completed some day hikes, and then set out on a three-night backwoods stint. At some point they drove over a rattlesnake, possibly an Eastern timber rattlesnake. It was injured but alive, so the counselor killed it with a stick, then thoughtfully cut it up so each kid could each bring home a snakeskin souvenir. Ours is now sitting in a paper cup of alcohol solution on the kitchen counter.

While camping in the backwoods, the male counselor was also bitten by a brown recluse spider, which is poisonous if not lethal. He toughed it out for a few days, but the bite was beginning to fester. So he decided to drive himself to a local hospital, with a plan to meet the rest of the group on Mount Mitchell, which they were preparing to climb.

Brown recluse spider

With his spider bite drained and bandaged, the counselor drove to the top of the mountain and  started hiking down to meet the group. En route, he happened upon a massive black bear who was not deterred by loud noise, as suggested in all the conventional literature and movies like “The Parent Trap.” Feeling threatened, the counselor dropped his day pack and ran down the mountain to meet the rest of the group. Forty-five minutes later, they started back up, assuming the bear would have moved on. No such luck. “Fuck!” exclaimed the counselor, who was leading the way–followed closely by my son–when they saw it again. The bear was not overtly menacing, but it didn’t seem in a rush to scurry off either–possibly because, as they later learned from the park ranger, some hikers had fed a black bear an entire ham earlier in the week. “Turn around,” the counselor said quietly to my son, “and tell everyone to drop their packs and run as fast as they can!” And that is what he did, while the counselor, armed with rocks, yelled at the top of his lungs to keep the bear at bay. The scariest part, my son said, was when he kept calling the counselor’s name–“Are you OK?”–but didn’t get a response.

The next day, we received an email from Overland. “Everyone is 100% safe and sound,” it began, then went on to describe a toned down version of the bear story we would later hear.  “Overland groups see bears with frequency on our outdoor programs and we do not usually email parents but this is a special case because when park rangers went to retrieve the packs from the trail, the bear had already taken them to another location, probably to investigate the lunches packed inside. Only one student actually saw the bear”–I knew instantly that would be my son–“but we wanted to contact you so you weren’t surprised when your son or daughter returned home without a day pack!”

My boy lost a thermal undershirt, a pair of Oakleys, a water bottle and $75 to the bear. But that’s a small price to pay for all that he gained: self-reliance, that fierce sense of community forged through adversity, respect for nature, and dreams of one day becoming an Overland counselor.

Posted in Boys will be boys, Parenting, Teenagers, Travel | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments