True Manhood

Julie is the Winston Churchill of home improvement speeches. One particular address, titled "Murder thy Branches of Tyranny," led to me balancing on the second-highest rung of an extension ladder while hand-sawing off a 10-inch diameter sunshine inhibitor.

I worried the branch might pendulum me off the ladder to my honorable death, so I tied the end of it to my neighbor's fence post.

See the strap there? It's ratcheted very tightly, so I imagined it would yank the severed branch away from me, probably with a poing sound, and I might live to see another day.

My dad used a similar technique while lying on his stomach in the living room and sawing an old rotten deck off the second story of his house. If that's evidence of true manhood, and I would argue that it is, then I still have a ways to go.

Here's a picture of me before I climbed higher. I'm submitting it to National Geographic with the caption "Dumb-ass in shorts."

Astonishingly, I cut the branch and didn't die. Then my neighbor Herb, who always kindly emails me when he sees a woodpecker on my house, brought over some kind of spray to, like, cauterize the tree's wound or something. Now Julie's garden will get more sun, and if I unwittingly killed the entire tree, then it will get way more sun.

Now, brimming with confidence and a new appreciation for life on the ground, I've embarked on the next project. This one was born of another of Julie's Churchillian orations about the state of the backyard, this time titled "Fortify Nature's Bounteous Bosom." She wants raised gardens for vegetables. The instructions are on a website called Pioneer Woman, an excellent resource for hardcore men like me.

So I went to Menard's and bought lumber. Apparently, what you're supposed to do is drive your pickup truck to the lumberyard in back and load 'er up. At least that's the impression I got when I pushed my shopping cart back there. Good times, good times.

And Finally, Horse Camp Retrospective, Part 4: Ironclad Memory of Fun New Things

For dinner, Lyla eats 1 roll, 2 brownies, 0 pieces of chicken, 0 vegetables, and 67 tater tots. Since none of the dads are actually in charge of their daughters here, this nutritional imbalance goes unchallenged. The girls are all happy but exhausted. Al-Vah has fallen asleep on her plate.

After dinner, a flag ceremony, and a truly unfortunate singalong, the trading post opens, and Lyla makes a bee-line for it faster than a bee making a line to something. I follow because I have the money. She selects a woodland color-by-number and a stuffed raccoon for Rowan.

In the bunk room while she colors, we await the evening campfire, still an hour away. More girls file in, their dads following. Lyla abandons the color-by-number, and the girls collectively get a second wind. They rile each other up, shrieking and whooping. Then they run out of the room in a herd, and the other dads and I listen as they invent a game with inexplicable rules. It sounds roughly like a Pentecostal revival.

Lyla takes a six-second break from the game to inform me that, while she will not be attending the campfire, I am nevertheless permitted to bring her back a S'more. This has become like a ritual for us. She says she doesn't want to do something (such as ride horses, shoot arrows, and attend campfires), but I pep-talk her until she grudgingly reconsiders, and then she loves it and files it away into her ironclad memory of fun new things. Except for singalongs: everyone has limits.

Lyla leaves and comes back: "Daddy, someone just put a phone in one of the toilets." Of course someone did.

Later, we do make S'mores, but Lyla and I return to the bunk room ahead of the masses so that we can FaceTime with Julie. Another girl hears Julie's voice and joins us, chats with Julie about this and that; her name is Mamie, and her dad's in the shower. Had the other girls not been outside still chowing down on S'mores, they would have all gathered around to talk to Julie too. In the absence of your actual mother, any mother will do.

The place becomes a zoo again before long. Lyla gallops around with the herd, whipping ribbons and coming *this* close to putting out eyeballs. Slowly and one by one, the girls get plucked out of the herd by their dads and prepared for bed. While other girls cry and protest, Lyla puts on pajamas without complaint and returns to her color-by-number.

In the dimness of the following morning, Father's Day, Lyla is up in her bunk again, coloring and coloring. Some unnamed friend has joined her, and below on my bunk I listen to them chat about school, brothers, and their favorite everythings. Elsewhere, bags get packed, hair gets brushed, and good food gets dreamed about. Lyla can be crazy and loud, but she is often quiet, and it is her quietness that has attracted this new friend. I think to myself, she's going to have a fulfilling life.

In awhile, we'll go help set up breakfast; Lyla has volunteered us again. We'll not-sing some more songs, and we'll say awkward goodbyes to Al-Vah, Mamie, and the others whose names escape me. The dads will grimace pleasantly at each other, and we'll all go home. And next June, without doubt, we'll come back and do it again.

Horse Camp Retrospective, Part 3: Snakes

Robin-Hooding an arrow straight to the bulls-eye, or better yet bisecting your rival's recently bulls-eyed arrow, is very different from what we experience. Lyla's first arrow swishes into the grass four inches in front of her, and she glares at me because I exist.

"Fantastic!" I tell her. "The first arrow I ever shot traveled 1/3 that distance. And I was 11."

It's the hot part of the day. None of the promised rain has fallen, so the arrows practically stop midair in the 99.9% humidity. After shooting (such a hyperbolic word, really) enough arrows to allow us to later claim we gave it a serious go, we head back to the bunks, peel off our sweat-soaked clothes, and prepare for a swim.

The swimming hole is Lake Barbara. If there's a more aptly named lake for a Girl Scout camp, I don't know what it is. It's man-made (slap my hand: woman-made) and only 5.5 feet deep in the center. As I look for a shady spot to dump our stuff, I stop mid-stride. A cobra has uncoiled in the grass, reared up, and spread its hood. It hisses at me, and its inch-long fangs glisten with venom. Okay, it's actually a small garter snake slithering away sluggishly, but since I've been deathly afraid of snakes my whole life, it might as well be Nagini unleashed by He Who Shall Not Be Named, and by that I mean Trump, not Voldemort.

In normal circumstances, I would find a secluded place to rock myself in a fetal position and probably cry a little. When you're surrounded by men and seven-year-old girls, however, that isn't a socially appropriate reaction. Lyla must notice my ashen complexion, but she says nothing. My heart is pounding. I'm sweating profusely. It's truly a phobia, and I need to sit down.

Through glazed eyes I see all these dads and daughters splashing around in a bizarre post-apocalyptic world with no wives and no sons. We're the last of the human race, and the only other living things are snakes.

Horse Camp Retrospective, Part 2: Hanging with Hercules

Among us dads, no one has stepped up as the authoritative voice, so the girls have taken over, and we just sit there haplessly and bear witness to the carnage. All we would've needed last night was one proper mom to enforce the 10:30 lights-out. Instead, the girls overpowered us, each going to sleep when she damn well pleased. But this morning there's at least a lot of coffee, so between that and a shower in sulfur-water, I'm at least feeling more alive than dead.

After breakfast, our group hikes to the horse stable. Once there, the horse lady conducts an eyes-closed poll to determine our relative levels of horse experience and comfort. Lyla gets Simon, a horse for "scared kids with no riding experience."

Disregarding the eyes-closed nature of the poll, I discover I am the only dad who "has ridden a handful of times and isn't scared." So I get assigned to Hercules, who is gigantic and hungry.

"If Hercules tries to move you from side to side," says Horse Lady, "use your tummy muscles to keep yourself on."

"Good. Yes. Will do." Nothing like having a woman give you tummy advice in front of Dad-peers and 7-year-old girls. I'm currently cement-mixing pancakes, mystery sausage, and seven plastic mugs of coffee, so I'm not sure any of the alleged tummy muscles are even available. I approach Hercules how I imagine John Wayne might, all bow-legged and confident. Introduce myself. Pat him on the neck. Threaten to have him processed into Ikea meatballs if he gives me any guff.

Miraculously, everyone maneuvers their beasts around the oval without incident. Later in the day, I am happy to report, Hercules throws a dad off. One without tummy muscles.

"Daddy," Lyla says, "if we buy Simon, I'm going to rename him River."

"Would you keep him in your bedroom?"

"No," she says with the "Are you an imbecile?" tone she's perfected.

Bag lunch. Tie-dyeing. A rest back at the bunks. Well, I rest. Lyla and Al-Vah run around like maniacs. Al-Vah has no inhibition, no filter. Lyla is calm and mannerly, but she's attracted to this wildness. She won't be the biggest party-animal on campus, but that'll be the girl she chooses to room with. She is Simon at heart, but she wants to hang with Hercules.

Horse Camp Retrospective, Part 1: Night of the Seven-Year-Old Howler Monkeys

A year ago, Lyla intercepted the Girl Scout camp catalog before I had a chance to hide it. That's how we found ourselves at horse camp over Father's Day weekend--because what better way to honor fathers than to bounce their crotches around on horses?

Below are excerpts from the Moleskine I kept in the event I didn't survive.

Lyla and I pass the lice check with flying colors. Welcome to camp! Step this way, please, and allow these teenagers with rubber gloves to inspect your scalps. She lingers I believe too judgmentally over my burgeoning bald spot before grunting and waving us through. Lyla allows me to run back out into the rain by myself to retrieve all our gear.

I return half-soaked to find Lyla getting her nails painted by her new best friend Ailbe, pronounced Al-Vah, whose Irish dad in his Appetite for Destruction t-shirt gets his nails painted too. Then Al-Vah dumps powdered Gatorade into all the other girls' water bottles, and Lyla is in cracked-out heaven. The other dads and I sit on our bunks and eavesdrop. I am quite proud when my at-times shy daughter regales everyone with the story of the pancakes she ate at Perkin's.

We dads are delightfully anti-social with one another. We nod and grimace pleasantly, but that's it. There's a tacit agreement that the intense and temporary camp friendships are better left to our daughters, who are now laughing like howler monkeys at something one of them said.

Later at the evening large-group gathering, Lyla and I discover we have the same attitude about singalongs, which is that we hate them. However, we differ profoundly in work ethic. As a boy at camp, my goal was always to avoid work at all costs, but Lyla, ever her mother's daughter, signs us up for "Dinner Hoppers" for tomorrow night, which I think means we'll have to fill waters and fetch food. Or at least she will. I'm going to try to get out of it.

Back in our bunk room, I lie on my plastic institutional mattress. All the girls are still tripping on Al-Vah's Gatorade, nail polish fumes, and the promise of an absurdly late 10:30 lights-out. The dads continue the grimacing and nodding while the girls play tag and chuck stuffed animals. It's an asylum, or at least a juvenile detention center. It's Orange Is the New Black, the dads and daughters edition. And it's only 9:51.

Several grievances

We have spelling bees at dinnertime. It's not some overbearing tiger-parent thing; the kids demand it. I don't know how it started, but I guess when two nerds love each other very much and decide to make babies, there's a chance it might result in spelling bees.

"Lyla, spell 'development'."

"No, Rowan."

Maybe it's time to sign them up for team sports.

Julie gave Lyla "grievance," which she spelled "greevence." So, no dessert for Lyla. Just kidding.

"Do you know what 'grievance' means, Lyla?"

"No."

"If you have a reason to complain about something, then you have a grievance."

At that instant the floodgates of 8-year-old disapproval burst open, and Lyla aired grievances for the next 10 minutes.

"Lyla, if you decide to share these concerns with your teacher tomorrow, make sure you use the word 'grievance'."

"Okay, I'll tell her I have a grievance."

"Several grievances."

"Yeah."

Mathematically Proficient Human

Time-tests in math class are still a thing, for some reason. It must be important to know how to do arithmetic quickly. Apparently the universe wants to negate that last sentence because I spelled "arithmetic" seven different incorrect ways before getting it right.

In Lyla's class, you have to get 50/50 correct for three Tuesdays in a row before you get moved to the next kind of math. Many kids are still hacking away at addition, while a handful are getting clobbered by subtraction. When Lyla graduated subtraction, she came home worried.

"What if next Tuesday I don't get very many multiplication problems right, and other kids see?" Second grade logic at its finest.

"Lyla, some of these kids struggle to add their own fingers together. You're the only kid on multiplication, right?"

"Yeah."

"So, even if you get every single problem wrong, you're still the most mathematically proficient human in the room. Not that anybody cares."

"Yeah, but."

Checkmate. No arguments hold water against an 8-year-old's "yeah, but." So Julie made her a bunch of multiplication tables, and Lyla taped them by her bed. At dinner each night, we analyzed various scenarios. And for the next three consecutive Tuesdays, Lyla aced the multiplication time-tests. You'd think she'd end-zone spike the test on her teacher's desk or mic-drop her pencil, but she hardly even talked about it. At some point, time-tests stopped feeling like a big deal to her--which is what time-tests should be: not a big deal.

So now she's pretty chill about division, and I couldn't be happier about that. If we even remember to ask her on a Tuesday afternoon how the time-test went, she'll say she got 28 or 30 out of 50, and then she'll nonchalantly change the subject.

But I do take a certain paternal pride that her teacher struggled to actually locate a division time-test; she'd never had a kid graduate multiplication. And I can say that without sounding boastful because clearly Lyla doesn't get it from me. I can barely spell arithmetic.