They were looking for volunteers, but it was easy for me to beg off. My son, Max's middle school music programs were looking for chaperons to accompany the band, choir and orchestra to a competition with a side trip to an amusement park on the way home.
It would be a Saturday that started at 5:15 a.m. and returned after midnight. A good portion of your day would be spent riding on a bus full of middle school students. But as wonderful as that sounds, I had no trouble saying "no," I did it last year.
It started about three weeks before the seventh-grade trip when Max came home with the permission slip for the field trip. The orchestra, along with the band and the choir, would be going to the competition in Shelby, Ohio, and then on to the Cedar Point. The packet also said they were looking for parent volunteers to be chaperons.
I tried to hide as Stacy and Max were talking about it, especially when they outlined the start and end times. But Stacy gave the “of course you’re going to do this for your child” look.
Stacy said she would do it, but she was already committed to do the Race for the Cure that day. How can you argue with that? So I said I would go.
For a couple of weeks I didn’t worry about it too much, but as is got closer the dread started to set in. First was the starting time. I’ve never been much good in the morning. It used to be the only way I ever saw 5:45 in the morning was by staying up all night. But since this wasn’t about watching the sun rise and then going to bed, I figured that was a bad idea.
The other part of the assignment that was making me a little anxious was the idea of being responsible for a group of what I assumed would be all 12- and 13-year-old boys in an amusement park. Under the best of conditions, taking charge of a group like that is a little like herding chickens. By the time you get most of the going in one direction, a couple of the stragglers will have wandered off. If you go after them, you’ll lose the ones you have headed in the right direction.
But I’d committed myself, so there was no backing out of it.
Thursday night there was a preview performance of music the orchestra would be performing. Afterward as I was trying to get my lone chicken to pack up his cello and get to the car, a number of his friends told me that they were going to be in my group for the field trip.
I didn’t know how many I was going to get total, but I knew I’d have Alex, Alex, Michael and John, plus Max. Five wouldn’t have been too bad. But when I got there on the blurry-eyed Saturday morning, I found that my number was actually nine.
I guess not as many parents got the “of course you’re going to do this for your son (or daughter)” look as I might have hoped. So we loaded on the bus and headed north. Thankfully, it was not a school bus. I put on the iPod and tried to sleep.
It was not the best sleep I’ve ever had and as we approached Shelby, the kids began to get a little restless. This was the only truly disappointing part of the day. I guess disappointing is not really the right word. But as the kids entered Shelby, which has obviously not seen its best times economically in recent years, rather than count themselves lucky, the busload of kids was more than a little snobbish.
These were students from on of the fastest growing school district's in the country. The vast majority of them are from comparatively comfortable families and most have never gone to a school that’s older than they are. Shelby Middle School was built before their parents were born.
They were singularly unimpressed. But that’s understandable really. They’re young and haven’t seen a great deal of the world. They don’t really understand how good they’ve got it.
The time at the school for the competition was mainly an exercise in waiting. We were there from about 8:30 a.m. until 1:45 p.m. and my particular group of kids was on the stage for about 20 minutes.
So we tried to give them a schedule. We took them to the cafeteria and to the room to pick up their instruments and get them into tune. Then they got some time to walk around outside. Then back to the room to wait for our escort to the practice room. A rumor ran through the group that all of the school’s groups had been penalized points because the seventh-grade choir had been caught playing leap-frog in the hallways. It turned out that they’d just been given a warning.
Once the last of the school’s groups had performed, we loaded on to the buses and headed north to Cedar Point. My group of nine immediately became 10 as a boy from another group wanted to join ours. The problem was that once inside the park, they all had different agendas. I knew it was going to be impossible to keep all of my chickens headed in the same direction.
We entered the park at a little after 3 p.m. and were supposed to be back at the buses at 8:30. Some wanted to go directly to the Top-Fuel Dragster (two-hour wait, 17-second ride), others wanted to go to the arcade (spend $10 to win a 79-cent stuffed animal) and others wanted to find the roller coasters with the shorter lines and get as many rides in as they could even if it meant missing the big attractions.
We decided that we’d setting a meeting place for 6 o’clock so we could eat dinner and I could count noses (or beaks). I had a cell number for at least one person in each group if I needed to get a hold of them before that. So two groups of three went off on their own and I was left with four, Max, one of the Alexs, one of the Johns and Roberto. They were the group in search of the shortest lines.
I noticed one thing right off. Boys walk at a different speed in an amusement park. Normally, Max’s pace can best be described as a slow meander. When traveling from one roller coaster to another, they all fell into the Olympic race walk category.
While the boys waited in the shortest lines they could find, I tried to find a bench in the shade and put the iPod back on. My roller coasting days are behind me. Getting me into a roller coaster seat is a little snug and, while I don’t come off the rides feeling nauseous, I do feel a little beat up afterward. So I’d buy a $3.50 soda and wait, find the nearest restroom and wait some more.
To this credit, all the boys showed up at the rendezvous point more or less on time and after a flurry of last-minute chicken behavior (if they had to give any money back to their parents, the boys saw it as a personal defeat), we made it back to the bus on time. The ride back to Powell was not the snoozefest I anticipated, but they were relatively quiet as everyone compared notes on their afternoon at the park.
In the end, I delivered all nine of my chickens back in one piece. It's the kind of thing that was fun once, but now it's somebody else's turn.
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