Shoes and Broken Mirrors

Someone got whacked on the head with a shoe. The schoolroom full of Cub Scouts was a noisy place anyway and now someone was crying.

I was all, “What? What?” until I got my wits together enough to gather them around.

The sniffler was one of those who sniffles a lot and naturally gets picked on. The new kid, whose spirited permutations had led to this tragedy, was stoic and unrepentant.

“Josh,” I said, “that was not responsible.”

The other Cubs, the old guard of ten year olds to whom he was still an interloper, regarded him with disdain.

“We’re all a team, we get along …”

My own son had a superior, almost haughty look about him as he fell in with the anti Josh crowd.

“What happened, how did this … ?”

Words were failing me. Leadership was failing me. Suddenly I had a long look down the tunnel, through the dimness of opposing mirrors reflecting forever into the dark. Moments like this require either instincts to follow or a model to copy. I had neither.

“Josh, apologize to Steven.”

He did.

“What are you going to do so it doesn’t happen again?”

He didn’t know. Another Cub, who had no doubt witnessed a similar scene in his own history, said Josh should keep his hands to himself unless he has permission. I silently thanked that kid’s parents and said something to the effect of, Yeah.

Shortly they were back on track, energetically integrating whatever project I had set up for them within their natural chaos. I had a moment to look down that tunnel again and try to find understanding.

Boys need a man to lead them and show them. In the 1970s, society tried to drum that out of us. Too many men gleefully took the cue to abandon their responsibilities. But it’s true: without a male figure leading us as boys, we are lost and, too often, never again found. In that moment, as in thousands of other moments as a father, I felt lost. I had no childhood experience of male leadership to subconsciously process and return to the next generation. Forty years had given me nothing to base a plan on that would work with ten year old boys. I had nothing to fall back on but logic.

Fortunately, with boys logic often works. For about six minutes. I heard a scream and saw a shoe flying through the air.

“Josh!”

“It isn’t me!”