Aselin

Last night after Cub Scout Pack Meeting, the parents were milling around visiting with each other and about seven hundred cub scouts hopped up on sugar were jumping on this enclosed trampoline. They looked a little bit like a toy I had as a kid that was a gumball machine looking apparatus on wheels with a long stick. As I pushed the stick the gumballs would jump around the globe. Providing hours of entertainment for the simple-minded me.

Holding a classic ‘worms in dirt’ scout refreshment, I’m watching the frenetic popcorn action of the scouts out of the corner of my eye when suddenly, but not surprisingly, there’s crying.

All the scouts have frozen and they’re all looking at two prone comrades wailing in pain. Like some sort of incompetent teen trying to unhook a bra strap, I’m trying to unlatch the entrance to the enclosure and extract the wounded. We don’t own a trampoline let alone a net to lock people inside, so I’m completely bamboozled by the contraption.

Suddenly I notice there’s blood. Lots of scout blood. (Glad it’s not my trampoline). By this time two more parents have arrived and are pressed up against the mesh. I’m calling to each of the boys trying to get their names. The mother of one of the fallen was on my left, and I finally got one of the lucid caged to cough up the name of the bleeder.

For the sake of anonymity the names have been changed. So “Beuford’s” mother ushers him from the enclosure, but “Horace’s” parent is nowhere to be found. I ask the man next to me if he know’s Horace’s parents to which he replies “Which Horace?”

Now, the Horace is not going to die, but he is bleeding all over the trampoline and has spent about five minutes writhing in pain in front of his peers, so on the scale of cub scout injuries, this ranks in the “get the parent’s zone.”

Me, being the wit that I am look this man straight faced in the eye, point to Horace and say, “That one.” He doesn’t respond.

One of the talents I developed in honor of an impending high school graduation was the ability to whistle REALLY loud. (Nothing attracts the fellas like a shrill dog call). So, I whistle to the crowd and call for Horace’s parent. While everyone is looking at me, no one is responding. Yikes. Horace the wounded bleeder is an orphan. Poor kid.

I proceed to crawl into the trampoline when the aformentioned man standing next to me holds me back and says “I’m Horace’s dad.”

Now, had this man been my husband, OR, had I known him better, I would have smacked him in the back of the head. He stood there the whole time, even while I called for Horace’s parent to the crowd not claiming the kid.

I shake my head at Beuford’s mother, completely dumbfounded at this exchange.

In fairness, I have certainly pretended like my kids weren’t my own. There was the time unnamed child number three put together a “celebration of pink” outfit and did her own hair with an immersion blender. I dropped her off a couple of blocks from pre-school with her lunch and a map. The time at church when unnamed child number two audibly passed gas. Or the time unnamed child number one said to me in front of another parent “Mom, is this the lady who you said dressed badly?”

But NEVER when they were bleeding, and crying, and other people were yelling on their behalf.

I suppose that’s what comes from naming your kid “Horace.”