Camp Counselor

 I don't think I am ready for fatherhood.

Over the summer while I was working at the local parks and rec camp, we were eating lunch by the basketball courts and a kid came up to me absolutely bawling his eyes out. As he approached, I did a visual look over: He still had four limbs, there was no blood, and I noticed no snake flailing from his body as he came closer. I thought that maybe he was feeling warm or perhaps he had a breakup with a little camp crush or something. However, with a horror movie style high pitched scream, my inquiry was answered as he exclaimed "My mom packed me Gushers and I DON'T LIKE GUSHERS!!!" This feeling of relief washed over me so immediately and so completely it is not even funny like "Oh, okay you are crying over nonsense." Like kid, do you have any idea how lucky you are? My mom packed me grapes and carrots every day. Little did she know that during the trading at the Snack Time Stock Exchange there was this kid, who we will just call Cody, because that may or may not be his real name, who would trade zebra cakes, Doritos or Cosmic Brownies for my grapes and carrots. Now, will Cody undoubtedly live longer than me because of the healthy choices he made? Of course! But you know what? Life is not the amount of breaths you take, it's the moment that you get an entire pizza for yourself and are six or seven pieces in and think "All of my capillaries are clogged, but I'm not going to waste foil on one or two pieces of pizza!" and finish it off. While Cody seemed content with this exchange of goods, in my opinion, this was a more unfair trade than when........OK, here I was planning to incorporate a famously lopsided trade in sports history, but one day at camp I was playing catch with a football and on two different occasions I underran a ball that proceeded to bounce off the ground and clock me in the face. I have been taught a lot through my life experiences: one taught me love, one taught me patience, one taught me pain, one taught me that if you are going to attempt to be incognito about slipping popular girl power anthem lyrics into your silly story, it is best to not call out that you are doing it. This event with the football facial reconstruction spoke to me and it said "Hey, how about we leave the sports analogies to someone a little more qualified, mmkay?" I had him sit down next to me and attempted to calm him down by asking him if he had eaten other food he enjoyed and if he had been having fun at camp. He persisted with his claim that he had told his mother on numerous occasions that Gushers were not on his mind's menu. Now, if I had EVER told my mother what she was/was not allowed to pack in my lunch I would not be sitting here typing. There is another element of this that doesn't look good that I feel it is important for you to know. Allow me to explain, the back of the camp counselor shirts say "Staff" and while I was sitting on the rocks trying to apply emotional Band-Aids to the Gusher geyser, I was reminded of Psalm 23 that says "'your rod and your staff, they comfort me' and I thought "I'm 'staff', I'm comforting someone.........ha!" This means that if someone were to be viewing this third-rate therapy session from afar at just the right (or wrong) moment, they would see a kid gripping Gushers with the Ganges River pouring out of his face and then they would see me with a slow, stupid smile spreading over my face.

Burned by the Sun

 My freshman year of high school I had a shunt malfunction which resulted in a five week stay at Children’s Hospital in Boston. It was not all bad though as during that time I was visited by New England Patriots linebacker, Adalius Thomas who had a few journalists in toe. I got an autographed football, a great conversation and later on, a newspaper article out of it. In the article it talks about Adalius’s experience playing with the Baltimore Ravens and then going to become a member of the Patriots. Prior to the move, his wife who is a schoolteacher orchestrated this great send off for him with all the kids at her school in the gym. She said it was one of the few times in his life she saw him get emotional. It was at this point in the article that the journalist shifts from the roaring, cheering thunderous applause of a packed gymnasium to talk about Adalius’s visit to the hospital. The way the writer achieved this transition was with a juxtaposition and the phrase “However, no one came to visit fifteen-year-old Pelham native, Mark Woonton, who was in Boston Children’s Hospital for brain surgery.” Now, I am totally over it, I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter (which is why I feel the need to bring it up 16 years later.) I am sure we have all received a less than favorable review at work, a hateful voicemail, disparaging text message or a fortune cookie message that didn't make sense. However, if an employed journalist has never come to your hospital bedside and then put into print and circulation the inference that you were some no friend having, sudoku strewn about your tray table, chocolate pudding stains on your johnny loser, for all of the readers of the Lowell Sun sports section to see you should count your blessings because we are not all so lucky. 

Goodwill Haunting

 That trip to Goodwill is pretty nerve-wracking, huh? Driving down the road like a mobile game of I Spy like "I see in my CR-V, a bike, a lamp and a Jaromir Jagr rookie card." The drive itself is pretty tense trying not to damage anything and then at every stop I also feel like people are looking in my back window asking themselves if I straight up robbed a house at 2:30 in the afternoon on a Monday.