Timebomb, Part 2

July, 2019

Eventually, what you realize is that the metaphor, the timebomb, doesn't blow up.  It grows up, or at least he starts to.
Rowan has a scar the color of a pearl across his hairline and one to match it right below his chin, and halfway between the two rests his huge, toothy smile.  But his balance is otherworldly now.  He's deft, fast on his feet, he dances on the pedals when he climbs the hill between my house and Shawn's.  He stands up when he climbs, I understand, because I stand up when I climb.  But where I'm a masher still at 41, he's light on the pedals like a feather, like Contador.  

I'm well aware that comparing ones child to Contador isn't healthy, for anyone, but I see what I see.

For now, we ride together.  As they say, the family that rides together stays together.  They also get chiggers together.  They run out of chain lube at the same time and sound like a nest of hungry mice together.  They fight over who gets which clif bar today, and where are my fucking gloves, etc.  It's not all sunshine and Saturdays.

"Where's mommy, "Avery demands from over my shoulder.  I'm sitting on the couch, exhausted, and she's draped across the back of it, like a bored cat looking for trouble.
"Mommy is riding, sweetie," I tell her.
"Why is Mommy riding so early?"  The swish of her tail.
"Because Mommy is doing the Hundo this year."
"What even is the Hundo?" Avery groans.
"The Hundo is part of the reason you exist."
She doesn't click that link, not yet.  For now she tolerates simple answers.  But someday when she does I hope she'll understand that what we're doing out there at this hour isn't riding bikes so much as it is becoming a more complete person, one who has been somewhere.

I try to explain the abstract to Rowan, that as a culture we are now so far removed from real, natural adversity that we have made it a recreation - something we pay for - no longer something that, like life, just happens to us.  It's a game we play so we don't forget how.  He eyes me, skeptical of my story, but I show him how to sharpen a chainsaw, or plug a tire, or clean fish while the latest bad news streams 24/7 on a television that we pretty much don't even turn on anymore, and I hope to God he doesn't need it.

When your wife becomes your riding buddy, your world changes a little.  We cover details now that we didn't get into before: Pre-race bathroom habits.  Soil color as it relates to traction.  Chaffing.  We spend two huge, dreamlike days in The Forest together, riding big miles and enjoying the freedom to love each other with no one else around, just a huge green blanket of summer leaves overhead between us and the bright blue sky.  We are afforded this, I know, because she's chosen it.  I'm proud of her, but also, selfishly, I'm in my happiest place with my favorite person, something most people never get the chance to do.

There is worry, of course.  I follow her down Dowel's draft, careful to point out from behind her all the places that the trail wants to eat you, pull you down into the forest on your left, end your day.  There are just so many obstacles.  The bees near the top of Bridge Hollow.  The way your valve stems can fill with sealant and leak all day.  The pizza at aid 5.  So many of these lessons, I got to learn as a 20-something kid out in Colorado, where the consequence of my mistakes were just so...I'm not sure. But all of the errors that I survived then, I'm determined to guide my wife around them the easy way now.  But why?

You forget, narrator, that the metaphor barely applies now.  The timebomb never blew up.  It's taken some falls, sure, but it's wearing a $300 helmet.  The people you love in your life simply have to make their own mistakes now, learn their own lessons.  You can't shortcut the hardest, most important parts of the truth.

So I try to ride behind them, watch the world roll out before them.  I see their tracks sometimes in the dirt on trails I've already taken, some of them my line and some of them...not.

The trail splits and dowels's goes left, but magic moss goes right.  Make no mistake, you're straddling your bike at one of the best places on this planet, and sure, there's one direction you'd prefer over the other.

But they get to choose.

Up, up, up.

Timebomb, Part 1

December, 2014

“How long’s a minute?” Rowan asks me over lunch.  I see that he has torn through the board games while I made sandwiches, and he’s distributed monopoly money, playing cards, chess pieces, everything, in a trail from the closet to the kitchen table.  Now he’s sitting, finally, and he clutches a little plastic hourglass in his hand and holds it forth, the stitches in his chin framing his big, toothy smile.   “What’s this?”  

We usually don’t allow him to have toys at the table, but at least he’s sitting still.  Also, we’re exhausted.  “You need to put that all back in the closet when you’re done with lunch,” my wife tells him, eyeing the latest mess.  Around us, Rowan’s imagination stretches across the floor from the front door to the back porch, so many legos and books that we can hardly walk.  

“What’s this?” he asks again, peering into the hourglass as the sand flows through the tight plastic funnel.  

“That’s an hourglass,” I tell him.  

“No,” he replies, “Not an hour.”  

He is correct.  In the broken sentences of a 3-year-old, he explains to me that it only takes a minute for the sand to traverse from one side of the little plastic tube to the other.  

“It’s still called an hourglass, though,” I tell him, though I’m not actually sure if that’s true. The minutes pass like hours and we don’t know what to do.  

After lunch, Rowan cleans up.  Then he builds a fort with the couch cushions, and he knocks over a potted plant in the front hall. “Find something else to play with,” my wife tells him.  

He attempts to ride his bike up the stairs.  

He flips the kitchen chairs on their sides to build a wall.  

He jumps from the back of the couch to the mantle and hits his head, and he howls like a wild animal. 

We give him some ice for his head, but he eats it and almost chokes.  

He turns on every sink in the house and runs around with his pants off.  

We redress him and send him outside, and he constructs a trap out of sticks on the front steps to try to capture Santa.  

“Santa already came on Sunday,” I try to reason with him.  He doesn’t come back for one year.  

“How long’s a year?” Rowan asks.  

I check my watch, and it’s only been 20 minutes since lunch.

I start to answer him, but he’s already digging for grubs in the front flowerbed, churning up last years’ bulbs with a plastic shovel.  

He tries to jam his shovel into the heat pump next to the house.  

He rides his bike into a tree on purpose.  

He rushes around back to get a garden hose, but he trips and skins his knee.

Part of his problem is simple physics.  Little boys grow fast, but it comes in fits and starts, and it’s not always proportionate. His short legs are quick, but his head and feet seem huge by comparison.  He leans forward and runs full speed through the kitchen, but his legs can’t keep up, so he falls forward and hits his face on the corner of the wall. 

“It’s like trying to parent an explosion,” my wife observes, trying to see how bad it is this time through the blood and dirt.    

Part of his problem is hard-wired.  The security guard at the entrance to the Emergency Room welcomes us back for our second trip this week: “Hi, Rowan.”

Shannon fills out paperwork at the front desk, and I try to manage our son who is still on the hunt for trouble.  It required five stitches to sew his chin last week, and I’m guessing it will take at least five more in his forehead this time.  I chase him through the waiting room, “Perhaps now would be an OK time not to jump on the couch, Rowan.” 

When we return home, Rowan is finally asleep in the back seat, fresh stitches in his forehead.  I carry him through the darkness.  He’s limp and warm in my arms, momentarily defused. At the threshold of his room, I trip on some kind of trap he built earlier in the day, and I almost drop him. 

My wife takes a knee to inspect the trap, like a Vietnam War film.  This time, it appears he used pillows, scissors, a Godzilla action figure, and he wrapped it all together with leftover Christmas ribbon. 

Shannon clears the trap, a professional by now, but still none of this is making sense to her.  

“Why does he keep doing this?” She whispers as we tuck him in, but her voice is tense, bewildered.

“He’s dynamite,” I tell my wife.  “This is how he learns.”

Grains of powder in an hourglass of crash and burns.