Harry speed-walks through Wal-Mart, Atlanta Braves hat pulled low on his forehead, baggy shorts hanging well below his knees. In his hand is a Ziploc bag filled with crumpled dollar bills and silver coins, which he swings back and forth as he sings, “I’m going to buy a toy, I’m going to buy a toy!”
“Slow down,” his father says.
Harry speeds up.
The father keeps pace until they reach Lawn and Gardens, where he stops to rest against a display of pesticides guaranteeing to kill every bug known to man. Watching his son move farther and farther away, the father curses Sam Walton. The father curses his son. The father curses himself for cursing his son, who only wants what all children everywhere want: something shiny and new.
“Harry, wait up, please!”
Harry, change jingling, disappears down an aisle with an end cap display of toy guns.
The father takes a deep breath and gives chase. First he walks, and then he jogs, and then, once the fear of his five-year-old son being kidnapped by sadists looking for precocious, doe-eyed boys and incredible savings has completely taken hold, he bursts into a full sprint, weaving in and out of shoppers, some frightened by the thirty-eight-year old man barreling toward them, others merely pissed off.
“Sorry,” the father mutters to no one as he reaches the toy gun display. He catches his breath and turns right. There, standing in the middle of the toy weapon aisle, is Harry. In the boy’s left hand is the Ziploc bag of money. In his right hand is a plastic gun, which he is aiming at his father, who raises his hands in surrender.
“Thought we were partners,” says the father. “Thought we were going to split the loot fifty-fifty.”
“We were never partners.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, that’s so.” Harry drops the money on the floor, places his left hand over his right to steady his aim. He closes one eye, grins, and pulls the trigger.
The father grabs his stomach and staggers backward.
“I got you with my laser gun, Daddy! I finally got you!”
“So you just shot your ride home. With a laser.”
“I can drive home.” Harry pulls the trigger five more times and drops the gun, laughing like a Bond villain on amphetamine.
“Okay, Harry, fun’s over. Put that gun back where you found it.”
“No.”
“Put the gun back, or you’ll lose privileges.”
“I’ll do it later.”
“Do it now, or I’ll take your money away.”
“You can’t take my money away, Daddy. It’s mine. I earned it.”
“You’re right, Harry. That money is yours, and these,” says the father pointing down, “are my legs, which I will use to walk to my car and drive to my house without allowing you to use your money.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, son, I will. Unless you put the gun back where you found it. Pretty please and thank you.”
Harry doesn’t say anything. For twelve seconds. He picks up his Ziploc bag, stares at the money, and then asks if he has enough money to buy the gun.
The father sighs, for this is a genuine parenting dilemma.
On the one hand, what the boy said about the money being his is true; he’d earned a bulk of the Ziploc bag’s contents by meticulously stacking boxes at his mother’s office, and, by all accounts, did so without complaining, which pleased the father, a miserly grump who rarely buys anything and frequently informs the boy that the only way to get money is to work. The father wants Harry to, within reason, make his own money and make his own decisions about how to spend said money.
But on the other hand, the father despises guns. As such, he is now suddenly, and perhaps irrationally, worried he might be raising a psychopath, simply because Harry wants to buy an ersatz weapon. The father toys with the idea of giving Harry a lecture on why real guns are bad, on why automatic weapons like the one in the lad’s hand, for instance, should be outlawed immediately and permanently, and only highly-trained military and law enforcement should be permitted to carry handguns, period.
“Daddy, do I have enough money?”
Still thinking about what the father would say to those NRA members who need their precious rifles and shotguns in order to hunt game, he scratches his head. He doesn’t want to talk about guns to a five-year-old, but he does want his son to understand how dangerous they are and, when he is old enough and mature enough, to decide for himself what, if any, value the Fourth Amendment has to him. Another parenting dilemma. So, after internally exhausting all other possible options, the father opts to tell the truth.
“Harry, you do have enough money to buy that gun, and your money is your money. However, I strongly dislike guns, even fake ones. So I can’t let you buy that thing. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Daddy, I understand.”
“What do you understand?”
“That you’re mean.” He giggles. “And that guns can kill people. And only God can kill people.”
The father, an agnostic, wonders where all the God talk lately is coming from. Earlier this week, Harry informed his father that God created everything everywhere, including the beaches and the trees and the Legos and the animals and and the people and the donuts, even the super yummy ones with chocolate icing and sprinkles, and what did Daddy think of that? Doesn’t Daddy think God created everything, too? Similar to the gun conversation, the father panicked, and then told the truth, that while he has respect for those with faith in God (and even a measure of envy), he also finds it far more likely that Earth was not created by one all-powerful guy, but was formed by Science and Time and Nature and other capitalized words that Daddy doesn’t even remotely understand.
But the father is too tired to have another heavy conversation. Especially in the middle of Wal-Mart. Where it is crowded and smells of bleach and old lady perfume and American consumerism.
“Harry, put the laser gun back on the shelf, okay?”
“It’s not a laser gun, Daddy,” the boy says doing as instructed. “It’s a Nerf gun. It says so right there on the box.”
The father laughs.
Harry snatches up his bag of money, places his hands behind his back, and walks away, change jingling.
In the next aisle, Harry picks up a black box and says, “Can I get this chess set, Daddy?”
At first, the father smiles. Chess. A game of kings and strategy and thought. What better way could a young child spend his money? The father’s heart swells, imaging all sorts of good-natured chess battles at the kitchen table, each one worthy of a Saturday Evening Post cover.
But then the father worries that his only son will end up like Bobby Fischer, an Anti-Semite with only a tenuous hold on reality.
“Daddy, why do you look so sad?”
“It’s nothing,” the father says and kisses the boy’s smooth cheek. “The chess set is perfect.”
“Do I have enough money?”
“Save your money,” the father says. “I’ll pay for this.”
Yesterday, my essay “Time to Get Clean” went live on 
Harry stomps the ant hill a second time, and a third, and a fourth. He exhales and looks up past the fifty or sixty parents and grandparents waiting for the player introductions, their cell phones poised to record every adorable moment. His eyes settle on Field #1, and he remembers something more important than his hunger pangs. He remembers that he is ready. He is ready to sprint past all those grinning grown-ups, and out onto that soccer pitch, for Field #1 is not a slightly uneven patch of grass behind Kelleytown Baptist Church. Oh no, Field #1 is Stamford Bridge, the Cathedral-esque soccer stadium in London, where Harry’s beloved Chelsea Football Club chase not only silverware for the trophy case, but immortality.
The old man starts with a toe-headed boy named Edward, who scored seven goals in the opening match. Edward jogs down the tunnel, slapping high-fives with adults along the way. Next is Ally, a pretty brunette with temporary tattoos all down her left arm. She bumps fists with her dad, a burly guy sporting real tattoos on his arms and legs, and then she, too, runs down the tunnel. The third player called is Eli, a pint-sized boy with curly hair and an infectious smile. Eli holds out his hand, but Harry doesn’t slap it. Crouched low like a tiger about to pounce on his prey, he is completely focused on the tunnel, on hearing his own name announced. He has no time for sportsmanship or camaraderie.
The boy’s father observes quietly from the shade of the picnic area, far away from his lovely yet competitive wife and the rest of the maddening crowd. Despite the father’s intense love of both his son and of soccer, he rarely cheers, and he never, under any circumstances, calls out instructions to Harry like many of the other parents do. Instead, he’ll wait for Harry’s turn to sit on the bench and kiss the boy’s sweaty head, making sure to offer him a drink of water. “Stay hydrated” are about the only two words the father is comfortable saying during the games.
Picking up speed as he goes, he hears the thudding of little cleats behind him, none louder and faster than those of the very tall girl, who scored two goals in the first half. Fueled by his distaste for girls, especially tall blonde ones with superior soccer skills, he continues dribbling, keeping his touches close to his right foot while running as fast as he can. Entering the penalty box, he hears his mother yelling for him again, hears the other parents cheering, but he stays calm, focuses on maintaining control of the ball long enough to get within shooting range. In his head, he hears his father’s voice: “Strikers are ruthless. When you get near the goal, Harry, be as cold-blooded as a snake.” Thinking of his favorite snake, the lethal black mamba, he dribbles to within ten yards of the goal, eight, six.
“I bought you a Chelsea jersey for your birthday,” he says, suddenly uninterested in giving a lecture. “Guess whose name is on the back of it?”
Not aware that there were standings in the Person Game, I made a silent vow to do better, which meant I would try to make him laugh even harder next time I was called upon to answer a question. But, unfortunately, I didn’t get another chance because my wife said:
At this point in the story, I would like to mention two things. One, I am woefully out of shape. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a gifted athlete. Twenty years prior to this incident at our dinner table, I had a tennis scholarship to a Division I school. Before that I made the Varsity baseball team as a freshman. Before that I was the only white boy to make the Winston Lake AAU basketball, a squad that finished 3rd in the Regionals, and, eventually, produced several players who went on to play in college and beyond. BUT and HOWEVER, that was a long damn time ago. Two, I am a quitter. This, too, is something that has happened gradually over time. Two quick BEFORE and AFTER examples. When I was fifteen, I played in the 16 and Under North Carolina State Championship, even though I had just, a few days beforehand, finally kicked a prolonged bout of mononucleosis. During my fifth match, I started to get dizzy in the 95 degree heat and asked for a bathroom break. While I was in there, I blacked out, but when I awoke with a nasty headache I, foolishly, went back out on the court. Dizzy and dehydrated, heart pumping at well over 180 beats a minute, I won the match. . .and the next two I played. Now smash cut to last week when I was out for an evening walk and my heart started to race and I called my wife to come pick me up in the car. I was less than a block from our house. But I couldn’t convince myself that I wasn’t dying of a heart attack, so I gave up and called for rescue. Like I said: quitter.
This rankled me. “Harry,” I said, “we don’t gloat when we win, and we don’t whine when we lose. We shakes hands with our opponent and say, ‘Good job.'”
