The afternoon I became an honorary boy, sort of.

Sunday Afternoon with the Boys


A minor family emergency recently saw me having to take care of two nephews for most of one Sunday. I was kind of nervous about having to do this on such short notice. I know more about taking care of nieces than nephews. And these two are a bit of a challenge. Nephew #1 is in his early teens. A serious attention deficit or autism spectrum problem means that he needs quite a bit of watching. His younger brother has a bit of an attention span problem as well. He is very high-spirited and has a hard time keeping his feet on the ground. Taking care of them is a balancing act. You want to make sure they behave and don’t get themselves hurt or in trouble. But you don’t want to just sit on them either.

The first order of business was Sunday school and church. That went pretty well. The boys know how to be polite and respectful of others. It’s just a matter of keeping them on-mission. I learned some time back that sitting between them helps a lot.

After church we went to Subway to eat. I figured it would be better than their favorite place (McDonald’s, of course), while still being fun. They had a good time. Neither got much in the way of vegetables on his sandwich. I did not press the issue. I did wonder why Nephew #1 ordered jalapenos on his sandwich, only to remove them when he ate it. His motivations are difficult to understand sometimes. He cheerfully finished off the remains of the sandwich that his younger—and much smaller—brother could not finish.

After lunch we went to our house so that I could change clothes, my Sunday outfit not being very appropriate for a day out with the boys. I brought back to the car two old towels. They wondered what we were going to do. I just told them we were going some place later on where we might get wet, and promised they’d have a blast.

The day turned out very pretty after a couple of days of rain. I felt like exploring. The boys thought that sounded like a great idea for an adventure. So we piled into the old hatchback and headed off to check out some unfamiliar countryside.

Getting there took us through winding, hilly gravel roads that I’d never traveled before. Gravel roads can be fun to drive on. We ran through miles of clear-cut timberland, descending occasionally into fishy-smelling swamps and crossing one-lane wooden bridges of the sort that scared me as a child.

Above us we had a wide blue sky. It started out as cloudless; later fleecy clouds rolled in. They rolled fast in the gusty winds. The shadows of the clouds raced across the land so fast they reminded me of a time-lapse film. I wished I had brought my camera with me.

Nephew #2 got to sit beside me with the county road map and be the navigator. He did a fair job of it, all things considered. It was my fault that I turned down country road 409 instead of 408. I could have gotten where I wanted to go from there anyway, but had an attack of cold feet and talked myself into backtracking unnecessarily. We did not see another car the whole time. We did see a bridge that had been closed with a berm of gravel at the end. A set of tracks showed that someone had skirted the berm and used the bridge anyway. It looked like that vehicle was much heavier than mine. I took the better part of valor anyway. Besides, I had to set a good example.

After an hour or so of roaming we drove to a public fishing lake. The boys wondered whether we were going to swim. No, this lake did not have a swimming area. We did go to the bait shop (and boy did it ever smell like one!) for a snack. The boys betrayed their city-bred origins by marveling over the big tank of live crickets in one corner. They asked the elderly man at the counter whether he was afraid of the crickets all jumping out. He pointed out that there was a line around the tank that they couldn’t jump over.

When I paid for our snack he pulled out a compartmented plastic tub full of change. He drew my attention to the fact that one compartment was full of state commemorative quarters. He had collected almost a full set of those.

Back in the car, I drove us back to town along a different route. Now the boys found out why I had brought the towels. The old car had looked nasty enough even before riding on the gravel roads. Now we were going to wash it.

I had said they would have a blast, and they did. As soon as we got out of the car in the car wash bay he seized the high-pressure wand and pretended it was an Uzi submachine gun. Boys will be boys! After I had soaped the car down, they vied for the right to use the foam brush. Nephew #1 brushed it around for a bit with no particular rhyme or reason. Then I gave it to Nephew #2 and directed him in scrubbing the car more systematically. Finally I gave it another scrubbing.

When it came time to rinse, I doused it some and then handed the spray wand to Nephew #2. The high pressure almost knocked him off his feet. He got control of it and followed my directions to rinse the car, while I tried to keep his older brother from throwing foam at him. When we were done I had the boys towel off the windows to keep them from streaking. After all that the car still looked like it needed washing—just not as desperately as before.

For a while the sky had clouded to the point where I wondered whether we might have a rainy overcast. By the time we had finished with the car it had cleared again. Their chores on the car done, I took them to the city park. We began walking down the trail around the pond, toward the more isolated, downstream end of it. Nephew #2 was thrilled at getting to exercise. He loves to walk, like I do. Nephew #1 found a swatch of pine bough and amused himself by waving it around, dabbing at the water with it, and bugging his brother by scratching the back of his neck with the pine needles. After a couple of admonitions not to do this, he got the message.

I produced a trash bag and announced that we would pick up some of the litter people had left around the trail and the pond. Nephew #1 took no interest in this project. I did not force him. Nephew #2 was thrilled at the thought that, by helping to pick up litter, he was helping to save the planet. In his enthusiasm he kept walking right by most of the litter without noticing. He was quite happy to put anything I pointed to in the bag, though. He even demonstrated his strength by hauling the bag for a way. By the time we had gotten around the park, we had filled the bag too full to close. We left it in a trash can in the park’s picnic area.

Then we went home. The other grown-ups would be coming back to town at any time now. We hung out at the house, leaving the front door open in the mind weather. Nephew #1 read (or at least looked at) some of my comics. Nephew #2 played some of M.K.’s video games and played with the dog in the back yard. They looked at my camera collection for a bit (the wind-up 8-mm cameras fascinated Nephew #1). Nephew #2 found a stick in the front yard and gave a demonstration of his Ninja sword-fighting skills. All of this occupied about an hour until their mother, M.K., and the younger two children came home, the family emergency dealt with.

M.K. took everybody back to their house. Afterward I learned that the boys would not say where we had gone and what we had done that afternoon. That treated it as privileged information. Apparently the three of us were now a kind of secret society. In their eyes I was one of them. I felt honored.