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.