Water Snails and Tent Cage Match Unleashed

This past weekend was Father’s Day and, since I am an incredible, super-human, and humble father, I decided that a dad should spend Father’s Day weekend enjoying his kids.  This included camping, going to the beach, reading books and snuggling.  It also meant very little sleep, caffeine induced jitters, and a sunburn that made me look like an aspiring fire truck.  It was an amazing weekend. 

Since the boys had never spent the night in a tent, we decided to start gently by camping in the front yard.  The front yard is safe.  There are no bears in the front yard, just mosquitoes the size of matzo balls.  So we set up the tent they got for Christmas and put three twin mattresses inside.  With the floor completely “mattressized”, we then piled in sleeping bags, pillows, stuffed animals and a plastic truck.  It was the coolest.  Usually, the only time the boys and I have that much padding is when we play on the bed.  But beds are dangerous.  Kids can fall off beds when wrestling.  So can Daddies.  But in the tent…it was on.  It was the tent, cage match unleashed.  Flying, spinning tackles of death.  The double-team ninja dive and the resulting kung fu counter move.  We went wild.  Finally, after taking quite a few knee drops to the solar plexus, courtesy of my youngest son, I told them it was time to start calming down.  They replied with a phrase any parent of young children will recognize:

“More, Daddy!”

They didn’t want to stop.  They wanted to be flipped and tossed like a salad until they threw up.  And even then, they would still say, “More, Daddy!”

The next day the birds woke us up at 4:30 am.  It wasn’t the “beautiful, chirping” kind of bird noises though.  It was more of the “two condors fighting over a llama carcass just outside our tent” kind of noise.  We tried to go back to sleep but eventually went inside about an hour later.  After all, we had to get ready to go to the beach.  So after breakfast, working out and changing clothes, we packed everyone into the car and drove to the ocean. 

I don’t know about other parts of the country but on Cape Cod they have these things called jetties.  Not Jedis.  Jetties are long piles of giant rocks that stretch out into the water.  I’ve never been entirely sure what they are for but they are fun to climb on and fish off.  Naturally, this is where the boys want to explore.  Maybe it’s the jagged, barnacle encrusted rocks or the pounding surf but somewhere between the beach and the end of the jetty, my boys turn into Indiana Jones and I turn into Woody Allen.  But it’s at the end of the rocks that we can hunt for water snails and so that it where they go.  And I go, neurotically, behind them.

So we hunt the snails that cling to the rocks at the end of the jetty.  After five minutes I’m bored but the boys are just getting started.  Ten minutes. 

“Boys, do you want to go explore the marsh?”

“More snails, Daddy.”

Fifteen minutes.

“Boys, the sun is turning Daddy into a charcoal briquette.”

“More snails, Daddy.”

Twenty minutes.

“A seagull just pooed on my shoulder.”

“More snails, Daddy.”

They would keep hunting snails, pulling them off the rocks, throwing them back in and looking for more until they collapsed from exhaustion.

This is something I have a hard time understanding because repetitive things bore me.  With children this is only magnified because you need to show enthusiasm about each snail or ju-jitsu leg lock even if it’s the eight hundredth snail or karate move.  It can be very tiring.  And so, because as an adult I tire so easily, I begin to feign interest. 

“Really, Buddy!  That nine bazzillionth snail really is the super coolest.”

And so the joy of discovery, the newness that my boys experience with each wrestling move and sea creature gets lost on me.  Lost in the rehearsed responses of adulthood. 

It makes me think of the Gospel of Mark.  In the seventh chapter, Jesus is confronting the religious establishment of his day, The Pharisees.  What’s interesting to me is that the charge Jesus brings against them is that they have let go of the commands of God and are holding onto the traditions of men. When most people read that passage the part that jumps out to them is the word “traditions”.  What jumps out to me is the “…of men”.  I find it interesting that Jesus didn’t condemn tradition out right.  In fact, he says that they have rejected the “commands of God”, which, it so happens, involve lots of traditions.  Where he finds a problem is the traditions of men.  Those feigned responses of adulthood created so we can hide the fact that we’re bored.  The “amens” we say even though we don’t know what we are saying amen to.  We've forgotten what kids instinctively know.  How to rejoice in each snail, story, camp out, joke, etc...  What we need; what I need, is less traditions of men and more traditions of children.  Less grown-up and more child-like.  A heart that beats a little faster every time I come to worship, or pray or read my bible.  Joy every time I sing that hymn, or chorus, even if I’ve sung it nine bazillion times before.  And a soul that laughs and cries out, “More, Daddy” again and again and again.