I went to pick up my fourteen-year-old son, Mathias, his thirteen-year-old brother, Kasey, and Mathias’ friend from a local football game.
Trying to be smart, I arrived around halftime to beat the traffic.
This was my first mistake.
It took approximately thirty minutes to locate all of the teenagers and corral them back to the car, which was less like picking up children and more like herding feral cats in a stadium parking lot. During this process, Kasey fell down a hill not once, not twice, but four separate times, because apparently gravity had chosen him as its personal project for the evening.
At long last, we got everyone loaded up and started driving away from the football game, victorious.
Then Mathias announced that his glasses were missing.
So I pulled into a parking lot, parked the car, and told Kasey to stay put while the three of us walked the 200 yards back to where we had originally parked to search for the glasses.
We searched. And searched. And searched.
Alas, no glasses.
We did, however, run into one of Mathias’ friends, who said they would help him keep looking. So I headed back to the car to check on Kasey.
That’s when Kasey informed me he had to pee and began walking back toward the game.
As he shut the car door behind him, it locked.
Naturally, every other door was also locked.
Now, there were somewhere between ten and one thousand police cars in the area, but not a single actual officer in sight to ask about a lockout kit. Apparently, they had all vanished into the night at the exact moment I needed them.
So James had to go to my house, get the spare key for the car, and drive all the way to the game.
One important detail: James has a cold and had already taken nighttime cold medicine.
So while all of this was unfolding, James was not exactly operating at peak human alertness. He was basically a drowsy, congested rescue raccoon, moving through the world in a NyQuil-adjacent fog, trying to understand why his family had summoned him into a football parking lot emergency.
Meanwhile, Mathias and his entire cohort eventually returned.
Alas, still no glasses.
James finally arrived, heroically and half-asleep, but by then the football game had ended, which meant the missing police officers had magically reappeared and were now directing traffic. They would not let him into the parking lot, so this poor sick man — who should have been unconscious under a blanket — had to park in an adjacent lot and walk the spare key over to us like a medicated suburban quest-giver.
At long last, we unlocked the car.
And there, sitting peacefully in the middle seat, were Mathias’ glasses.
Exactly where he suddenly remembered placing them before he got in the car.
Final score: no one won
I fought every bit of traffic I had gone early to avoid.
Kasey was covered in mud from repeatedly losing his battle with the hill.
Mathias was hot, sweaty, and carrying a generous side order of embarrassment.
James, sick and half-sedated from nighttime cold medicine, had to drive out there just so I could get back into my own car.
And Mathias’ friend?
He was simply traumatized by the sheer power of our dysfunction.