Tonight over a sushi dinner my daughter said Tell Dylan about the ducts – nobody believes me!
I sighed; that particular story has been removed from my repertoire of anecdotes.
During the scant few months her father lived with us he did not know how to drive. Every morning I would make the trek to drop him off on base, thirty miles away, then drive home with the baby. In the evening we picked him up again and headed for the campus where I was attending graduate school, another thirty miles south. After my class I would then drive the sixty miles home and we would all collapse in various states of exhaustion.
Adjusting for other chores that would put my daily commute at something like two hundred miles a day – while still experiencing massive panic attacks during every single drive.
My lovely daughter, then two years old, only put up with it if I kept the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack on constant rotation. Even then she was inclined to break out of her car seat, so I often drove (manual transmission, no power steering) with my right hand in the back seat, attached to her leg.
The bit of the story she most enjoys (and definitely remembers) is what happened during the three or four hours each night she hung out with her biological father.
To add a piquant detail, remember that he would have been dressed in his Army uniform, he was often armed, and that the school was, well, extremely liberal.
What did her father think was suitable entertainment?
He broke into the heating ducts and took the baby prowling through the walls of the seminar buildings.
I thought this was a good use of their time, and also highly amusing. My classmates… didn’t.