The Perfect Day

Newsletter 2024-07-28

There’s no such thing as a perfect day, but I put together a pretty okay one Saturday. The key was remembering all the times I’ve gone above and beyond for my children only to underwhelm them. Most of my experiences as a dad are cautionary tales. You could write a parenting book by telling people to do the opposite of whatever I’ve done. Actually, I wrote that book—three times. I’ve put out a lot of words about raising kids for somebody who has no idea what they’re doing. This weekend, I put all those failures to good use by not scheduling any of the things my family hates. It’s a long list. Instead, I planned an amazing day they’ll be talking about for literally minutes. Successes are quickly forgotten. It’s the huge disasters that make for the best newsletters.

I started off the day by listening to my wife. That’s always a good move if I want to survive. She had been saying all week that she wanted to see the new Twister movie. It’s called Twisters, plural, because this time there’s multiple tornados. In the first film, there was famously only one. It was a very short movie. My kids had also been clamoring to see a movie, though not that one. When the first Twister came out, my oldest daughter was negative fourteen years old. Most of my girls wanted to see the new Minions installment. I would pay money not to go. If I wanted to hear a bunch of small things scream gibberish at me, I could just stay home.

Then I had a brilliant idea: We could all go to the theater together but see two different movies. Was such a thing even possible? By the rules, probably not. I’m sure children below a certain age are supposed to be accompanied by an adult. Not that I would qualify as one even if I was with them. I sometimes let my twelve-year-old go to movies on her own and no one has ever said anything. It probably depends on the individual kid and also on which theater employees are watching. Some of those sixteen-year-old ushers go mad with their first taste of power. We’re doomed when they get elected to an HOA. The worst thing my girls do at the movies is make a mess with the popcorn. It’s hard to get those kernels from the bucket to your mouth without also scattering them over the floor like you’re feeding chickens. My solution was to not buy any concessions. That let me be cheap while also blaming my kids. I was on fire.

Twisters started at 10:30, and the Minions movie started at 10:45. Those times are a.m., not p.m.. I can’t stay up that late, and I’m not paying primetime prices. I’m in the matinee tax bracket. I bought three tickets for Despicable Me 4 and three for Twisters. Betsy wanted to watch the grown-up movie with me and Lola rather than the kid one with her sisters. I immediately agreed. There are fewer and fewer situations where she’s willing to be seen in public with us—although she wouldn’t really be seen with us since movie theaters are dark. She chose her moment well. Getting the timing right was tricky. Twisters began before Despicable Me 4, but the latter was shorter. We got to the theater as close as possible to the start of the first movie to minimize downtime for the kids who were on their own. I told them to stay in their seats through the ending credits and then meet us at a bench outside our theater, which was only twenty feet from theirs. The security risks were minimal because no one else in this town goes to movies in the morning—or at all. At any given screening, you have a fifty percent chance of having the entire theater to yourself. I pity people who spend tens of thousands of dollars to build private theaters in their homes when I get something bigger and better for six dollars a ticket. The only tradeoff is I have to check in with my children every once in a while to make sure they haven’t been kidnapped. The savings are worth it.

Twisters was wonderfully stupid. I loved every second of it. It was about good, wholesome Americans fighting tornadoes, which, in the movie, are giant sky monsters terrorizing the countryside rather than freak natural events that only touch the ground for a few seconds at a time. The film did remind me that it’s remarkable that we live in a place where you need a basement on the off chance a sky demon arbitrarily decides to obliterate your house. Most other continents don’t have tornadoes because the countries there aren’t worth destroying. We only have so many twisters here because the wind hates us for our freedom. I don’t know what happened in the Minions movie. I’m guessing there were a lot of little yellow blobs that bounced around. That’s a more accurate plot summary than you’ll find on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite all the timing differences working against us, our respective groups got out of our theaters within a minute of each other. It was a coincidence that gave the illusion I knew what I was doing. Relishing that win, I pushed my luck. I loaded my family in the van and drove to the most exciting place on earth: the car wash.

Photo by Greg Johnson on Unsplash

No multi-million dollar blockbuster can compete with the sheer entertainment value of letting a machine spray your windows with some water. I didn’t take my children merely for the fun factor, although that was ninety-nine percent of it. My van was legitimately dirty. I’ve massacred a few million bugs on our various road trips this summer. This was a fancy car wash with fancy prices. It cost eleven dollars for the most basic, no-frills option, which excluded perks like tire polishing and a roof massage. By my children’s low standards, it was still quite exciting. Disneyland has nothing on those massive foam roller things. Their entire animatronics budget was wasted.

Riding that high, I dropped off Lola and the kids before heading to my next all-star attraction: Arby’s. My kids have been asking for it ever since they got a sheet of coupons at the Fourth of July parade and remembered Arby’s exists. Before that, I’d been guiding them toward cheaper fast food options. You can get your bodyweight in McNuggets without breaking the bank if you use the app. That’s the secret to skyrocketing restaurant prices. Fast food establishments will cut you a deal if you download their software and let them steal all your personal information. They can have it. I already give most of it away on the internet for free. Using the Arby’s app, I was able to get lunch for thirty bucks. Counting theater tickets and the car wash, I was still under a hundred dollars for the day. Not bad for the finest entertainment small town Indiana has to offer. I returned home with roast beef sandwiches and curly fries. My daughters greeted me like I was a rock star. I was on a roll.

That’s when we split up again. Betsy and Lola wanted to go shopping, I wanted to play disc golf, and the other three kids wanted to do absolutely nothing. Everyone got their wish. Betsy and Lola view shopping as a fun bonding activity rather than one of the slowest forms of torture. I suppose it’s good that they like it. If the responsibility fell to me, each child would have one set of clothing that they’d have to wear for the rest of their lifetimes. Those artificial fibers can really stretch. The other three kids feel the same way about shopping that I do. They were old enough to be spared the suffering. Having children who can watch themselves is the ultimate freedom. They can go to a movie on their own, and they can keep themselves alive when both parents and their oldest sister are out of the house. My youngest will start third grade in a few weeks. It’s time for her to start paying rent.

Their rising maturity (and my dropping standards) left me free to pursue my original plans. The only activity I initially had slated for this weekend was disc golf with the guys. It was supposed to start in the morning, which would have knocked out all the spur-of-the-moment stuff I did with my family. Instead, my brother-in-law Jerry had a conflict, and we moved our outing to the heat of the day in the late afternoon. We planned to do two courses in another suburb. I listened to an audio book about World War II on the way, making my already almost-perfect day ten times better. The disc golfing was good, too. The other members of our foursome were my boardgame friend, Peter, and my father-in-law, Bob. None of us but Jerry know how to throw a frisbee well, but we amused ourselves for a few hours while narrowly avoiding heat stroke. That’s more impressive than it sounds since we’re out of shape and poorly ventilated. Bob even wore pants. It’s like he was daring mother nature to make him burst into flames. He’s too old to stop, drop, and roll.

We intended to play thirty-six holes. We made it through twenty-seven. My sister-in-law, Alice, invited us over to her and Jerry’s house for food and games whenever we were done. It was a nice gesture, but it gave us a time limit. “Whenever” doesn’t really mean “whenever” when a bunch of hungry people are counting on us to return with pizza. It was just as well that we had an excuse to quit. Bob was demoralized on the twenty-sixth hole after losing one of his new discs in a retention pond. That was $2.16 worth of plastic gone forever. In the coming days,  I expect him to go out there in his fishing waders to retrieve it. On the next hole, Jerry nearly lost a disc, too. It was on course to land in the dead center of the pond before being deflected by the skinniest tree ever. It was divine intervention. Having used up all our miracles for the day, we headed home.

I picked up my family, games, and an ice cream cake and met Peter at Jerry’s house. I didn’t buy the cake specifically for the last-minute gathering. I recently discovered Walmart sells them for seventy-five percent off when they melt a little. I have a stockpile of misshapen but perfectly good desserts in my deep freeze. At Jerry’s house, we ate Costco pizza and distractedly played a card game while watching the Olympics. It’s a shame fighting tornadoes wasn’t one of the events. America definitely would have won gold. It was one of the best days of the summer, and one of the cheapest, too, since I didn’t pay Jerry back for the pizza. We’re not going to talk about how much Betsy and Lola spent at the store. I assume they went simply for the joy of browsing and didn’t buy anything. You don’t need to travel far or spend a lot to have a pretty okay day with people you sort of like. That’s all I want from life.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James