The Idiot Who Ran Into A Tree: A Summer Camp Story

Chapter 1 - Kicking Julian

2007

The boy's name was Julian. He was ten years old and I hated him.

With a bowl haircut and converging slanted eyebrows, Julian looked like a prepubescent Romulan. He was smart and intense. He liked anime, math, World of Warcraft. He liked feeding pinky mice to his bearded dragon, Jigsaw, who he named after the villain from the Saw movies which his parents inexplicably let him watch.

The fact that I knew so much about this kid was unusual. I made it a rule not to care about other peoples' children. But for the previous few months my daughter Hannah had a crush on him. She talked about him constantly, hashing and rehashing the meaning of his every action, gesture and word.

Girls.

Julian, I came to understand, ran hot and cold. One day he would invite her to sit next to him at lunch and her spirits soared. The next day he would steal her My Little Pony eraser and her mood turned gloomy. But then Julian would invite her to come to his house to watch the Back To The Future trilogy on DVD and the clouds parted... only to darken her skies again when he wouldn't let her play with his Iron Man action figures.

My wife Samantha had a lot more tolerance for fifth grade melodrama than I did. She would patiently coach Hannah, suggesting coping strategies that would hopefully minimize her uncertainty and frustration. But I knew it was all wasted breath. Hannah may have spent every waking hour obsessing over Julian, but Julian wasn't giving my daughter a second thought.

I couldn't tell that to Hannah, of course. One of the responsibilities of a parent is to let harsh realities sink in slowly, like a morphine drip, but with the opposite effect. So I would listen to her long and rambling stories as best I could, nodding sympathetically at regular intervals and trying to coax her out of her funk with humor. Which is what I did on a crisp autumn morning when I was driving carpool drop-off.

"Do you want me to kick him?" I asked Hannah, when she finished telling me about Julian's maddening aloofness during the previous day's recess.

She giggled. "You can't do that, Daddy."

"Of course I can. I outweigh Julian by, like, a hundred-and-fifty pounds," I explained. "I'm pretty sure I could take him."

More giggles. "But you'd get in trouble."

"There's no law against kicking Romulans."

Hannah burst out laughing. She always thought it was hilarious when I called Julian a Romulan, even though she didn't know what a Romulan was. (For those unfamiliar with the Star Trek lexicon, they're like Vulcans, but instead of being logical, they're assholes.)

Hannah was still laughing as I pulled up to the officially sanctioned drop-off area. I was the only four-door sedan in a line of massive SUV's.

"All right, baby," I said as a teacher opened the car door and helped her unbuckle. "Go learn stuff." She was in the back seat, so kissing her required an awkward contortion that I could feel sharply in my lower back.

I planted a kiss on Hannah's head and watched with satisfaction as my daughter, who had been miserable just minutes before, skipped - yes, skipped! - happily towards the school, her shiny black pony tail bouncing behind her.

I drove off, smiling. Because that, motherfuckers, was some first-rate parenting.

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"Aaron Rubicon?" the nurse called out.

I looked up from my copy of Us Weekly. I was in the middle of the cover story, a breathless article about the untimely death of America's sweetheart, Anna Nicole Smith.