The Superhero Birthday Party
August 31, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments
The whole living room was a wreck. The dining room looked like it had suffered a massive flood, flotsam and detritus left behind by receding waters covering every horizontal surface. The kitchen too. And our son's room? Well, that was just plain destroyed.
We hadn't planned on hosting the party, not in our small home anyway. No, we were planning on a sunny afternoon at the park. Sunshine, green grass, birthday cake and a whole bunch of evenly distributed, emptied-by-others trash cans so nicely supplied by the local government. Things change though, even in July, even when it's supposed to be sunny—like it had been every other year.
The theme was superheroes, and my wife had gone all out. She stayed up half the night sewing each guest—all the friends and cousins—individual superhero capes. We made up individual heroes based on the attributes of the kids. "John," for instance would be known as "John Triple J, The Jumping Javelin of Justice." I sketched out little insignias, and we cut them out of felt, which was color-coordinated and then sewn onto the back of their capes. It took me two hours one night to turn an old refrigerator box into a phone booth in which the kids could change from pre-schoolers to crime fighters. Don't even get me started on the cake, which a friend made and was so elaborate and fine it merited a blue ribbon and to have a picture hung up in the 4-H hall of fame. We put more effort into this party than all the other years previous combined.
But, hey, your oldest only turns five once, right?
Inevitably, this was the year the entire family was coming. Both set of grandparents, aunts, uncles and a half-dozen cousins. They had never visited before, not all at the same time. Since my wife and I went to high school together, our families live within a mile or two of each other. Its more efficient if we go see them, rather than they come and see us. But we had begged and pleaded, pleaded and begged. There were hefty doses of guilt and, I think, even some groveling and, in the end, we were victorious.
Maybe, in all the struggle to align schedules and make arrangements for hotel rooms, sew costumes and find matching paper plates, we should have made a last-minute check of the weather, but we didn't. I've never seen it rain so hard in our corner of the world. It was torrential, wrath-of-God kind of raining. Did I mention we live in a small home and had not planned on hosting the party?
I don't ordinarily like hosting anything. I don't like a bunch of people cluttering up where I live. I don't like constant worry about things being spilled or broken, don't like the idea of a bunch of people using my bathroom. I don't know if it is that I am a curmudgeon or a grumpy old man. Maybe I'm just a party pooper, but I don't much like sharing. So when the air began to get thick from perspiration, used breath and humidity, when the plates began stacking up in our kitchen trash can, when I began noticing things out of place, I ordinarily would have gotten itchy, grumpy.
But something was different this time.
