- April 28, 2024
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On Friday night, about a mile from home, we ran out of gas.
I coasted the horsepowerless Chevy Cobalt onto the grassy shoulder of Matanzas Woods Parkway and sat in silence with my two sons, 9-year-old Jackson and 7-year-old Grant. Unlike the last time I ran out of gas (on Belle Terre Parkway about a year ago), I didn’t call my wife to rescue me this time: She and our 3-year-old daughter were visiting family in Denver.
For the past week, I had been Mr. Mom. I charted out my schedule like Magellan, with reminders set to ding on my phone at every key moment: Drop off the boys at school. Pick up Jackson from Cub Scouts. Football practice.
It seemed like all we did was drive. I tried to make the most of it by interviewing the boys about how their classes were going, who their friends were, how they liked their teachers. But they had their own visions of how to spend the windshield time. Jackson made up new words to the Miley Cyrus song, “Wrecking Ball.” Grant practiced talking in a normal voice while plugging his nose.
The boys also took advantage of our drives to teach me a thing or two. We drove home after my softball game one night, and I was feeling sorry for myself because I made some errors at shortstop. Grant told me how I could improve. “You should work out your legs to get them stronger,” he said. “You know, high knees, butt kicks.”
One morning as we drove to school, I asked Grant if he was having fun in the Week With Dad. “Mmm,” he said, not taking his eyes off the first chapter of the second Harry Potter book. “Maybe. If we played more games.”
At school, he jumped out of the car and slung his backpack over his shoulders. I called out to him, “I love you!” As he was slamming the door shut, he said, “OK.”
All this driving was made more stressful by the constant smell of gasoline. I had been trying to ignore a probable gas leak for the past couple of weeks, but it had gotten worse. Based on the number of miles I was getting on a tank, I estimated I was dripping about a third of my hard-earned gas money all over U.S. 1.
My friend Alex offered to fix it for me, and he suggested it would be easier to work on the gas tank if it were mostly empty. Considering I was looking for ways to take control of something — anything — in an otherwise chaotic week, I took his suggestion to heart and then some. I set a goal to run out of gas exactly at 1 p.m. Saturday, when I was scheduled to arrive on his driveway.
Unfortunately, I was off by about 16 hours, and there we were, sputtering on Matanzas Woods Parkway, and then finally dead.
Grant was not pleased. He was tired. It was the fourth day in a row that he was up past his bedtime. “You’re pushing the car,” he said to me.
But Mom wasn’t the only one who always had a trick up her sleeve.
I had put a red, 2-gallon can in a bin in the trunk just in case I had miscalculated. So, the crisis was easily solved as I dumped in enough 87 octane to get us to the nearest gas station, where I pumped in 1.5 gallons — just enough to make it to Jackson’s football game and back the next morning, and then to reach Alex’s house.
One new fuel pump later, and it was Saturday night. Mom arrived. We survived. It wasn’t the week of fun and excitement that I had hoped it would be, but at least life would now go back to normal.
I was disappointed that we hadn’t spent what I would consider “quality time.” There were no real heart-to-heart talks. Most of the words of wisdom I poured on them rolled right off like rain off a duck.
And then Grant made me re-evaluate my definition of “quality time.” I went in to the boys’ bedroom to say good night, and Grant got out of bed and stood up in the dark, as if I were an important guest in his territory.
“I had a fun week, Dad,” he said. And he crawled under his covers.
“I love you, Grant.”
“I love you, too.”
It was a good reminder that, when they went to bed each night, when I was sitting on the couch alone in a semi-daze, wondering what exactly I had done all day, I was experiencing the fruits of “quality time.” Because quantity time means quality time. In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s in the Cobalt or on a roller coaster — it still adds up to something you might call we’re-in-this-together, or boredom-with-you-is-the-best-kind-of-boredom, or Family.
