Father's Day came early in our house.  Three days early, because Thursday was the day that both boys got to take home their Father's Day projects from school.

It had been a long evening - Ian had baseball practice, I had to go to the auto parts store afterwards to pick up a few replacement bulbs for my car lights, and the boys went with me, since Amy took off grocery shopping with Madeleine once I got to Ian's game.  [Of course, a trip to the auto parts store is never just that - it's the purchase of toy cars at Auto Zone, along with the bulbs, a pathetic attempt on my part to replace the license plate bulb in a parking lot, a candy trip to a gas station, and a side-trip to McDonald's for plumbing, prompted by the time lapse of all the other activities.]  But when we got home, Ian had a whole other lineup of activities in mind.

It was my job to wait outside while Ian fixed up the house per his own pre-existing designs.  It was also my job to help Amy carry in groceries, so I did the latter, and then the former, and revisited the whole lightbulb project in the driveway as I waited.

Sometime after I had gotten the lightbulb socket free from its enclosure, but not before I managed to unscrew the stubbornly resistant old lightbulb [bring on the ethnic jokes...], Ian came out to get me, and I understood that auto repair had to wait.  Ian was leading me not into the house, but into an entire adventure - a treasure hunt - replete with clues.  Before I could get beyond the second or third clue, our search was interrupted by Madeleine saying something like "Can I take this clue out of my hair?"

The clues read as follows:

- find your first-born son [not hard at that moment]
- In my lunchbox (on the diningroom table)
- to the TV you must go
- now in the kitchen you must look
- your wife has the next clue [on her head, it turned out]
- diningroom table (under my experiment) [sic]
- inside papertowel roll for next clue [arrow provided]
- now to this plate you must flea [sic] [arrow]
- in your pocket like a rocket [yes, he had planted a clue on my person]
- if you dare, go to Madelienes hair [sic]
- [and finally:]  now look in the refridgorator to find your surprise


It turned out that the treasure was being stored in the refrigerator for good reason; my father's day present was a can of Sam's Club Cola, embedded in a hand-decorated cup holder - the kind people bring to the beach to keep their beverages cold, only, in this case, with decorations such as a dog silhouette and writing, in a few places, celebrating Daddy.  This present was gift-wrapped in transparent blue cellophane, bunched up at the top, which was tied together with a string.

Ian had me open my gift at the dining room table, where he had also amassed a few other presents in a pile, beginning with a Father's Day card - an elaborate, colored-in project, in the shape of a brown shoe, with a tongue that moves up and down, and an ad-libbed sheet outlining Daddy's qualities.  Most touching, though, was a simple sheet of white paper with ring-holes for a binder, clearly from Mommy's office, ripped into two-thirds the original size, reading down the middle, in blue ink:

happy
fathers day
from
Ian


It seems that Ian wanted to bind up the entire parcel of Father's Day gifts with a simple introductory cover-sheet which would drive home the Father's Day message.

Young Daniel could not hold himself back at this point.  It turned out that he, too, had a Father's Day present for me, from school, and he wanted to organize his own treasure hunt, on the spot, for me to find it.

I was instructed to close my eyes.  Our compromise was that I could keep my eyes open, but I must keep them on my plate, where I was seated at the dining room table, eating supper.  I broke this rule at least once, to talk to someone, I think it was, and I was properly corrected...

Daniel's treasure hunt had its own twist:  the clues were entirely drawn, rather than written.  I think I had been a bit surprised that he was "writing" all those clues as I ate my supper, without asking anyone for help spelling anything, but once I saw the clues, I understood why this was the case.  It turned out that it wasn't for lack of literacy -  Daniel can sort-of spell now, especially with help from Ian and Amy - but rather in the interests of time;  Daniel consciously decided to draw, rather than write, my treasure-hunt clues, to save time, what with  it being so late at night by this point...The phenomenon of drawn clues reminded me of Colonial New England, such a vivid and beloved part of my own childhood associations (I was in grade school in Boston during the bicentennial);  apparently in not-so-literate pre-revolutionary America, business would put images rather than words on the signs outside their shops - a shoe for a cobbler's shop, etc.

So Daniel ripped a red sheet of construction paper into clue-cards of many shapes and sizes and drew the following clues on them - often requiring consultation before they could be properly deciphered:
 - a chair [he described the chair in more verbal terms, once I looked at the clue, since we happen to have more than one chair in our house]
- a refrigerator
- a TV
- a window [turned out that the next clue was on the window sill; he led me into the room with this clue, to help narrow things down]
- [best of all] a dog.  I said, "Oh!  A dog!" and tried to imagine how he would plant a clue on a dog.  Butt it turns out that the dog was actually Mommy's bed [technically my bed, too, but who would have guessed...].  The dog's head was actually a pillow, the legs were legs of a bed.

However, Daniel quickly back-pedaled, and said that it was actually just a bed (in the abstract) and not Mommy's bed.  This led me to believe that Mommy's bed should perhaps be the last place that I look.  Madeleine was frothing at the bit, once I got upstairs, to let me know that I had walked right past the present on Mommy's bed.  Daniel was trying, rather aggressively, to suppress that message, but luckily I had no idea what she was saying, and instead looked at absolutely every other bed in the house, and things construed as beds for purposes of ruling out additional clue locations, before "finding" the present on "Mommy's bed."

Daniel's present was a delightful little card, which he made in school, with a cut-out green tie on the front with the name "Daddy" on it, and many blue polka-dots around it, and cut-out collar , making altogether for a fancy polka-dot-patterned orange shirt with  a tie.  On the inside was an ad-libbed celebration of Daddy, clearly filled out by a teacher (or teacher's aide), in pencil, with Daniel's block-print signature at the bottom in green crayon.  The form reads as follows, with the ad-libbed sections underlined:

My Dad Rocks!  [picture of a rock with #1 on it]

My dad and I play tick-tac-toe [quite true].
My dad and I go to the movies [guilty, to Amy's chagrin].
My dad and I watch TV.
My dad an d I like to play.
My dad is SPECIAL!


Happy Father's Day!

Love,

Daniel

I told the boys that their presents were wonderful, and most wonderful was all the love that went into them, and into the exciting treasure hunts which led to them, all of which is quite true.

(June 13, 2012)