Tales from the Dad Side Read Online Free PDF

Inexplicably, sometimes I dreamed I wasn’t just nude, but sitting in a see-through aquarium being pushed through the school in a shopping cart. Eventually I just regarded it as some post-traumatic stress craziness and classified it as a dopey dream. Curiously, the worst part about showing up for school naked was no pockets—where does a guy keep his protractor?
    Fast-forward a generation, and my wife and I made a pledge to try to keep our children from going through the school shabbiness we’d experienced. Because I’d lived in so many houses in so many towns, I made a vow to give our kids some stability and never move from our house, because we always wanted them to know exactly where home was.
    There are few things harder for a parent than sending his or herfive-year-old off to school, except maybe a colonoscopy, although they both require ample sedation. I was at work when our eldest went to school on the first day, so my wife chronicled it with photographs and videotape, and when she realized “They don’t have seat belts on the bus!” she and the neighbor lady hopped in a chase vehicle and tailed the bus, “just to make sure it went to the right school” three blocks from our house.
    While a parent’s anxiety is palpable, our son, Peter, didn’t wait for weeks or months to let his apprehension build to a crescendo. He freaked out the first day before lunch.
    RRRRIIIINNNNGGGGGGGG!
    â€œWho’s in trouble?” my son asked his kindergarten teacher as she picked up a ringing egg timer. Peter sat there with the panicked look of somebody caught halfway down the sheet rope in a prison break.
    â€œNobody…yet,” she said with a laugh, compounding his confusion. Some kids are terrified of Santa or, for good reason, clowns; Peter had a childhood fear of egg timers. Whenever his best friend Phil got in trouble, Phil’s mother would twist an egg timer for an appropriate length of punishment and sentence the boy for that amount of time in the dreaded time-out chair. Name-calling got five minutes, wire fraud ten to twenty.
    When my son heard the egg timer he assumed somebody was in trouble and about to be marched over to the time-out chair. His kindergarten teacher had decided that the class would color for exactly ten minutes, and to be precise she started an egg timer. My son was almost done with his coloring assignment when time ran out halfway through his blue period.
    To her credit the teacher later diagnosed a little anxiety and called him up to her desk to talk privately. As she explained how the timer helped her manage time, he was half listening, half exploring the off-limits region of the teacher’s desk. In particular his eye was drawn to a row of shiny cans stacked on shelves next to the story corner. After the timer talk he politely asked what the cans were, and she glanced over and said, “Oh, that’s my special protection.”
    Unable to read the label, from one of his Berenstain Bears books he recognized a single word on a can: net. He then deduced as any five-year-old would that it was some sort of protective aerosol net from the labs of Spider-Man. Suddenly my son was panicked by the prospect of not finishing assignments on time—when the buzzer went off, the teacher would unholster a can and ensnare him in a liquid net and then drag him down to the principal’s office, where he would be forced to sit in a corner until he could correctly name the state capital of Rhode Island.
    â€œRhode Island City?”
    When he got home and was asked for a first-day review, he gave the teacher good marks, and then, over chicken-fried chicken, almost as an afterthought, he revealed, “She’s got cans of protection.”
    Protection in a can?
    Clearly his teacher had tear gas in class. Having promised I would not be one of those buttinsky dads, I followed my wife’s sage advice not to complain immediately. Instead, I waited to