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Sometimes the 10-year-old and the 58-year-old in our house butt heads.
That would be me and our fourth-grade son. We are both at an age that amplifies irritability – pre-puberty for him, pre-senility for me.
He thinks it’s his constitutional right to be entertained on weekends – which usually means a structured outing that jump-starts the dopamine injectors in his brain.
“I don’t want to just sit here all day,” he lamented last Sunday morning, still in his pajamas.
“Well,” I replied, “what would you like to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said curling up in a blanket on the couch.
“I know something,” I said. “Why don’t we go to a Lookouts baseball game? We haven’t done that in a while. Want to?”
“Not really,” he said, yawning.
“Well, what do you want to do then?” I said, beginning to get annoyed.
“I told you. I don’t know what I want to do!” he said emphatically. “I just want to do something.”
“OK, then, I’m done asking. I’ve played this game before with you: I endlessly suggest things to do, and you endlessly say no. Get back to me when you have an actual thought, OK?”
“Humph,” he snorted, flopping over.
With that, he rolled up in the blanket like an insect in a cocoon.
After a couple of hours, he made a second pass at me.
“Daddy, what about that car show thing in East Ridge?” he said.
“You mean the Bug-a-Paluza VW show,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “Can we go?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
For him and me, an interest in cars is the bridge across our 48-year age divide. He is sort of a car savant. Just the other day he was telling me about the subtle styling cues shared by Bentley and Chrysler.
“If you own a Chrysler 300, you can trick people, and it makes you look rich,” he concluded.
On the way to Bug-a-Paluza at Camp Jordan, he scanned the Internet for car auctions and begged me to take him to one. He spotted a Mecum Auction in Louisville, Ky., in September and immediately asked Siri, the iPhone concierge, our proximity.
“Chattanooga is about 305 miles from Louisville by car or about 223 miles as the crow flies,” Siri responded.
“As the crow flies?” the boy repeated with a furrowed brow.
“AS THE CROW FLIES?” he said again incredulously, as if he were tasting the words for the first time.
Then he began to giggle in his magical, little boy way.
We arrived at Camp Jordan about 1 p.m. on Sunday, and his eyes widened immediately. In front of us was a sea of 350 VWs: Beetles, Karmann Ghias, Sciroccos, Things, Buses, Vans, GTIs.
“Whoa,” my son said as he beheld the acres of mostly custom VWs. “This is cool.”
For over an hour we worshiped at the shrine of Fahrvergnügen.
We stood slack-jawed in front of a VW bug customized to look like a midcentury pickup truck. We marveled at another bug outfitted with a small-block Chevy engine.
I introduced him to the Thing, an 1970s experiment that produced a VW that looks like an armoured troop carrier. We pondered some Beetle Trikes made with the front end of a motorcycle and the rear end of a Beetle. We came upon magnificent restorations of VW buses and triumphant reimaginings of the sporty Karmann Ghia.
Halfway through, we stopped to get a cup of purple shaved ice to share.
“I sure am glad we came to this,” the boy said, digging into his treat with a plastic spoon.
“Me, too,” I said.
A few steps later, I felt a tiny cold hand slip into mine, and I tried to conceal a smile.
At 10, it’s a bold act to reach for your father’s hand, and so I savored the moment.
You never know. The rituals of childhood slip away quietly. Sometimes you don’t even notice until they are long gone.
If that was it, the last time my younger son ever reaches for my hand in public, at least God gave me the good sense to mark the moment.
It was a sunny day in April 2017, and fatherhood never felt so good.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.