The Drowning Boy

Talk Her Down - Starsailor (mp3)
Everybody Out of the Water - The Wallflowers (mp3)

The following is a true story. There’s a lesson in here somewhere.

On an afternoon in late June, I receive a phone call from a friend’s wife. “Did a boy drown in your school’s lake?” she asks. We call it a lake. It’s not really a lake. It’s an over-large glorified round pool, the kind of overcompensation that makes masculinity and testosterone continue producing at the proper levels for future generations.

“Come again?” I say.

“Like, recently? Did a boy or some kid drown in your lake? Or something like that? I’m just calling you because you’d know if that was true, right?”

She isn’t completely panicked, but she’s definitely fighting fear of a possible truth.

“Um, no. No child or adult has died in or near our lake at any time that I can recall. Certainly not recently,” I say.

“Well that’s what I figured,” she says, clearly relieved. “But Mac got in the car today and told me this story, and I just had to call you to make sure.”

“What story was that?”

“Well, he said that at camp today -- he started robotics camp over there today -- one of the counselors was standing with them before they took their swim tests, and Mac said the counselor told them that the reason they have swim tests is because a boy drowned in the lake.”

My face scrunches up with a mix of disbelief and contemplation, but she can’t see that because I don’t have those new iPhones. “That’s weird,” I say. What I don’t say is that I have trouble accepting the veracity of this entire story. Their son is quite creative. Any part of it could have been generated from his noggin like Simon with his magic chalk.

This theory was encouraged when she went further with stories about shark teeth that had fallen off necklaces and gathered a magic life of their own, biting kids who went in the wrong areas of the pool. Having to convince another adult that shark teeth simply cannot bite without mandibles and muscles and the like often helps chart the appropriate absurdity to a conversation.

“Well, that’s all,” she says. But she’s clearly hanging on for something, some additional comfort or piece of information from me.

“Listen, I’ll ask around just to be sure, but trust me that it’s not true... about the drowning thing, not the shark teeth.”

The next morning, I’m sitting in my office, and my coworker comes in. His son is at a camp here, too, and he’s talking to me about his son swimming yesterday, which immediately gets me thinking about the phone call.

So I tell him my amusing Tale of the Frightened Mom and The Drowning Boy. And something not good happens. He stops me before I’m finished and says, “My son actually said something similar last week.”

“Come again?” I claim that’s what I say because it sounds a lot more professional and mature than “You’re shitting me.”

“He said one of the counselors told him that a kid had drowned in the lake. I just ignored it at the time, because I figured it was one of those spooky stories counselors tell kids to get them to obey rules.”

At this point, what was clearly a fluke, the product of one boy’s flighty imagination, mutated into something more disturbing. Two different campers. Two different camps. Likely two different counselors, both telling tales of children drowning to impressionable minds (and future admission prospects).

So I sent an email relaying precisely this to the head of our camps. Accusing no one of anything. Merely laying out what I had heard as I had heard it. Including the shark teeth. But certainly expressing concern about the potential for serious headaches if the story proved out.

The director, in turn, passed it to three different camp directors and the teacher in charge of our lifeguards. The fire of panic spread quickly from there, with nervous detective work on the part of several people hitting overdrive the next day. By the end of that following day, barely 24 hours after the ruckus first stirred up, it was relayed to me the Closer-To-Real story: Mac, the original firestarter, had overheard two of the adults -- not counselors -- talking in the lunch hall -- not at the lake -- about a boy who had recently drowned in Lake Chickamauga -- not our school’s “lake.”

Just over 36 hours after my first hearing of Mac’s drowning tale, I was writing an email apologizing to all parties involved for stirring up what proved to be a fairly pointless panic.

A month or so later, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m still not sure how I should have done things differently. But I’m also feeling that I didn’t do things quite right, either.

Maybe it’s inevitable to feel that way with false alarms.

But dammit, maybe not.

Thus, I’ve occasionally spent my space-out summertime fiddling with that little Rubik’s Cube of a dilemma.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Isn’t there...?

Th-Th-That's All Folks!

Sit and Wonder - The Verve (mp3)

"I think a midlife crisis is anytime you're waking up in the middle of the night asking yourself, 'Is this going to be my life?'" -- my pal Matt

I got to eat lunch with my friend Matt earlier this week. Matt is a doctor in town. We went to undergrad together and were mutual friends of friends who always got along swimmingly, and he somehow found himself completing his residency in Chattanooga of all places.

Matt is a kick-ass pediatrician. If there was some kind of World Series of Pediatric Care, I'd put some money on him because he's the full package: gentle, compassionate, confident, absolutely brilliant, and passionately dedicated. He's passed up some incredible job opportunities (translation: shitloads of money) because he believes so deeply in what he's doing.

He first became a parent four years ago, and now they have two kids. Parenthood hit Matt and his wife like Mike Tyson with brass knuckles. My theory -- we haven't really talked about it THAT much, 'cuz we're, like, guys, and we prefer talking about UNC sports -- is that Matt and his wife were prepared. He's a pediatrician, and she's a nurse who worked in the pediatric ward of a local hospital until recently. They're around kids all the time. He was dispensing advice constantly to parents about how to handle their children. It's our job to know kids, and we love kids, and we're around them all day every day, so raising our own should be pretty easy, is what I think they thought.

I still remember the first time Matt was able to make it out for a night of beer, four or five months after their first child was born, and he looked like a defeated man. "I had no idea" was the general gist of his reaction to parenthood.

He'd seen exhausted parents at the end of their psychological rope hundreds of times. Friends like myself had shared our own tales of the It Ain't All Wine + Roses variety. But when you're brilliant and gentle and caring and passionate and confident, the challenges facing normal humans don't concern you much. It's like expecting Tiger Woods to be worried about a 5-foot putt just 'cuz a lot of duffers miss theirs.

Here are just two things I've learned to believe about parenting:

(1) The smarter and more passionate you are about parenting before you become a parent, the more likely you'll be absolutely miserable and convinced you're a failure once you become one; and
(2) The more of a control freak you are, the more likely children will break your soul (or you theirs) for a while.

(Please note. We're talking likelihoods here, not cold hard absolutes.)

We were talking about parenting, and life, when Matt spoke the quote atop this page. He wasn't talking about himself when he spoke the words, but both of us ended up acknowledging that, to some extent, we've both struggled with that question more recently than we ever imagined we would.

Personally, I often struggle with the feeling that I'm "circling the runway."

Professionally, I'm in a position where my only options for advancement require that I leave my current job, and probably Chattanooga, and possibly education in general. But I like my job. My job is "a good, solid 7 1/2." It brings me plenty of satisfaction, and I know with certainty that I am appreciated and of value. Secure, satisfactory, static.

Domestically, I'm in a position where my only options for advancement require that I leave my current wife, and probably Chattanooga, and possibly everyone else who ever had any respect for me. But I love my wife. My wife is "a good, solid... um... 10 1/2..." and my family brings me more satisfaction than I could remotely deserve. I also know with certainty that I am appreciated and of value. Secure, satisfactory, static. [This is a clever joke, people. I don't really consider it "advancement" to leave my spouse. Unless Evangeline Lilly really really needs me.]

Parenting, especially in those first three or four years, is so intense that few people have time for the midlife crisis because the crisis is the poopy diaper and the baby screaming so loud your eardrums start bleeding and the baby throwing food all over the floor. When you're waking up in the middle of the night, it's not to ask yourself an existential question, but rather to change your kid's diaper or rock them back to sleep. But once you get a handle on that -- well, as much of a handle as parents can remotely get -- then the static electricity of life can create some challenges.

Your job, as the loathed saying goes, "is what it is." Your family "is what it is." You try and confront the static electricity with a hobby or two. Maybe you start a blog. Maybe you obsess about World of Warcraft or shoe shopping or rec league soccer. Maybe you do some cool philanthropic stuff like joining a board or becoming a Big Sister. All to figure out whether those things are enough to release that static electricity the way reaching out for a metal doorknob would.

All I know is that, for the most part, it seems like almost everyone I know well enough to have this kind of conversation admits to having asked themselves this middle-of-the-night question somewhere between one and a hundred times.

Thankfully, for many of us in that boat, we can get up at 3 a.m., walk to the doorway of our child's bedroom, look at them sleeping peacefully, dreaming of unicorns or tractors or Ronald McDonald, and find some solace. When they awake in the middle of the night, we calm their fears and assure them everything's gonna be OK; gloriously, the reverse can also hold true.

When Perception Transforms Reality: GAS

Poor Misguided Fool - Starsailor (mp3)
Gas Panic (live) - Oasis (mp3)

Damnedest thing I've seen in a long time.

Gas stations so full of cars, so packed tight, that cars have stopped in the middle of the street waiting to pull in, and another car has rammed right into the backside of it. On the way from my mother's house in East Brainerd to my house in downtown Chattanooga, I witnessed this scene three separate times in the span of 25 minutes.

Three accidents at three gas stations, all within 15 miles of one another.

(I would have taken pictures of those, but I was on my scooter, and the one shot I tried was so blurry all you see is the blue lights of cop cars and the white lights of the gas station streaking all over the place. Above was the best I could do.)

Cars were packed four deep or more to a pump at every gas station I passed that hadn't already run out of gas.
An earlier version of this article in Chattanooga's online newsrag, the Chattanoogan, combined with the idiots on local talk radio, spurred our citizens into believing that, as of Friday morning, gas prices would skyrocket to $5 from their current $3.65 range.

I called some friends in other places tonight. Nothing like this is happening in Raleigh, or Atlanta, or Montgomery, or Nashville. It's happening in a few places in Florida, in Houston (where Ike is soon to rampage), and in Chatta-fucking-nooga. Either Chattanooga is waaaay ahead of its fellow cities, or we're the most gulliable lemmings this side of early 20th Century Germans.

As of 10 p.m. Thursday night, Google had "gas lines" articles from BlueRidgeNews.com, Chattanooga's rags, and Gatorsports.com. That was it, other than some stories about some crisis in Bolivia.


You'll have to pay me a shitload of cash to get me to believe it's pure coincidence that this happened on September 11.

If only we would just drill for oil in Alaska and off the Gulf Coast, this wouldn't happen. In 2042. Maybe.

"Poor Misguided Fool" is from Starsailor's first album, Love is Here. "Gas Panic" is from the Oasis concert CD, Familiar to Millions. The first is available on iTunes. The latter isn't available in download form anywhere I looked. Both bands are full of Brits who don't have to put up with our idiotic American gas fetish.