Halfway down the Danube

Poof

When I was a little boy, I used to disappear.

Not all that little, really. I was still disappearing until I was, oh, eleven, twelve? But by that time it wasn't so bad, because I knew my home telephone number, and was nearly as good at finding my Mom as she was at finding me. I went through a phase where I would get separated from her in a department store or shopping mall, realize it, and then have her paged. "Mrs. Muir, your son is at Aisle One. Mrs. Muir..." She seemed to find this upsetting. I told her that I'd learned it from all the times she had paged me over the years, but it didn't help. Go figure.

Anyway, my real glory days of disappearance were when I was much younger. Three, four, five years old. I didn't know my phone number, didn't know my address, couldn't describe my mother's last location better than "Mommy was over there". But hot damn was I good at disappearing. Crowded stores were a favorite, but anywhere would do. Airports and train stations. Parking lots. A busy sidewalk where Mom had paused to rummage in her purse. Central Park in New York City.

The ones my mother particularly remembers, after all these years? For amusement, the department store where I crawled under a rack of floor-length coats and went to sleep. For sheer white-knuckled terror, Rockaway Beach. You'd have to be a New Yorker to fully appreciate this, but Rockaway Beach is always standing-room-only crowded. The surf can get pretty rough, too, and there's a mean undertow. When I was a kid, there'd be a drowning or two every summer.

It's not a place where you want your five-year-old to simply vanish. But vanish I did, for three quarters of an hour. I don't even remember what I was doing -- possibly I went to look at the hot dog stand; I had no money, but it was always interesting to watch people buying hot dogs, the different things they put on them, and all. Or maybe not. But my mother still remembers it, oh yes.

...so we were driving from Ostheim to Passau, our first stop on the road to Bucharest. Ostheim is at the very northern tip of Bavaria; Passau is down at the southeastern corner, just a few miles from the border with Austria. It's about a four-hour drive. That's a longish while to drive with two small children without a break, so after a couple of hours we pulled into a truck stop.

Crowded truck stop. Busy truck stop.

You can see where this is going, right?

I just went around the corner to buy some apple juice for Claudia. Alan was with me, but after we stood in line for a few moments he started to fidget. (He hates lines.) So, "Go to Mommy," I said to him. He went around the corner. A minute or so passed...

"Where's Alan?"

"What? I sent him to you!"

"I never saw him!"

In the ten or fifteen meters between me and Claudia, he had just... disappeared.

Oh, we found him. It took about five minutes. Five very anxious minutes. David of course chose this moment to contribute an overflowing diaper, so Claudia's part in the search was cut short. The truck stop wasn't that big -- busy, but not big -- so there just weren't that many places to look. Although it's amazing how big a place can seem when you're thinking, what if someone grabbed him? Just offered him a friendly hand and walked off with him?

...he was in the men's room. He's very proud of his new bathroom skills, did we mention? So he had decided to go for a poop. A big old solo poop.

Now we are proud of his bathroom skills too, and want to encourage them. But we had to navigate a mixed message here, in a way perhaps too subtle for a three year old:

1) We're very glad that you can go to the bathroom by yourself.

2) But NEVER DO THAT AGAIN! AAHHH!!!

Epilogue: yesterday, we called my mother to tell her that we'd arrived home. Of course, I had to mention the truck stop incident. I suppose I was expecting some sympathy, some parental solidarity. Maybe some tips on how best to deal.

She cackled.

Posted by douglas at August 21, 2005 02:55 PM