Precious Cargo : Baby, It’s a Wild World

I have a friend who said whenever she got into the car for a trip, her mother would offer, “precious cargo, precious cargo.” That was her way of saying, “be careful; drive cautiously — you are my precious cargo.” 

I have another friend who wore a St. Christopher’s medallion when we went off to college. It was a lovely piece of gold jewelry. Her mother gave it to her as a high school graduation present. St. Christopher offers protection to travelers, so it was a blessing of protection for her while she would be away at school.

Aren’t we always trying to keep our loved ones safe and protected? 

When my older son was around three or four, he had some light-up tennis shoes. I didn’t pick them out for him — when we were at the shoe store and he saw them, he fell head over (literal) heels for them. But I was so grateful for those obnoxious shoes on two different occasions. One was after a fireworks show on a golf course.

We finished watching the last of the fireworks finale, a rainbow of whistling and popping followed by appreciative applause from the crowd. When we got up to fold up the blanket and say goodbye to friends, my son and a few buddies were horsing around nearby. But a minute later, I didn’t see him. The crowd was thick as people were folding up their chairs, making their way to their cars. 

That’s when I saw circles of light along the horizon, little spinning wheels of yellow. 

He was running along, showing off his lights to his friends. Thank the Lord for those light up shoes. And they worked their magic another time at a playground. Now, I don’t know who these people are that design a playground with basically one entrance and one exit so that it’s impossible to see or find your kid in the maze of it. We had gone to a park to have a picnic and watch a concert for children (kind of like the Wiggles). When the show was over, it was starting to get dark. Our son begged to go over to the playground, and I said it would be okay for a few minutes.

Little did I know the playground was like a black hole and once your kid went in, good luck finding him. My husband and I walked around and around that thing until finally, I saw those amazingly beautiful light-up shoes, like beaconing fireflies in the dark. God bless those things.

I learned my lesson on playground equipment like that, and to this day, my children (now grown) don’t know that the playground at the Nashville Zoo even exists. I studied the map and would go out of our way to avoid all nearby exhibits that might put us in the playground’s vicinity any time we made a trip there. Fool me once.

Except, I guess, when I had the bright idea to take my son to the local adventure museum by myself on a holiday weekend.

I was pregnant with my younger son at the time, and since my older son, then four years old, had a day off of school, I thought it would be a fun outing for us. I should have thought twice when we had to circle the parking lot several times to find a space that everybody and their brother had the same idea that day. But we eventually found a spot and proceeded into the museum.

It was going well, and we were both enjoying all the exhibits. The museum had just opened a big playground type of structure in the middle. My son asked if he could go on it “just a little.” I said okay, but regretted it instantly as it was mass chaos. I watched him play with levers and go up and down on platforms. Then before I knew it, he explored some stairs and was descending to the level below. I raced over to follow him, but it was body-to-body people, and I wasn’t going to get through in time. 

That’s when I spotted the blue tubular slide.

I hoisted myself into the slide, but about half-way down, I realized that this was going all the way to the bottom floor. I had thought it was just going one level down. Stretching my arms and legs out into a starfish, I started inch-worming my pregnant self backward, bit by bit. I don’t know if you have ever put yourself into a situation where you are trying to move back up a plastic tubular slide, but it’s not easy. I remember I was wearing a red and black maternity top, so I looked like a crazy spread-eagle ladybug trying to crawl my way back up. Just then here comes a kid behind me. He sees me and puts the brakes on. “Hey! Hey – no going backward!”

He’s right, everyone knows the universal law of no going back on the slide. How many times on the playground have we told this to kids? 

There’s no walking up the slide, there’s no loitering at the bottom of it; once you finish sliding you are to move promptly out of the way. There was nothing to do but slide on down and start looking for him. At the bottom of the “adventure tower” or whatever they called it, you realized the magnanimity of the thing. There was an entrance/exit on virtually every floor of the museum. So there was no telling where he was now. But he was right there where he’d walked down the stairs, on the platform below where we had been. He was engaged in a fun mirror situation, oblivious to my panic-stricken slide experience. 

But even when they get older, we want to keep an eye on them, to know that they are okay.

When that same son was in seventh grade, I took him and some of his friends to the Katy Perry concert. I got a seat in the next section over. Luckily, the theme of the show was neon, so I got the kids some glow-in-the-dark necklaces to wear. I could easily spot them all throughout the show. It was so great to be able to look over and see those four neon rings and know exactly where they were all through the night. 

And when they start driving, we want to know they get to where they are going.

Back in the day, before cell phones, all our parents had in their arsenal was to say. “call me when you get there.”  How many times did you look around for a payphone so you could check in with your parents? Or, you’d get to a friend’s house and get distracted and forget to call your mom, but then she’d call over there in a few minutes to check on you. Nowhere is this adage better illustrated than in the Goldbergs tv show when the mom (Beverly) is explaining to her son, a new driver, that he must only drive within a certain perimeter and he must always call her when he arrives at this destination: call me when you get there!

Someone told me the way he got around curfew in high school was that he would call home a little bit after 11 pm when he was supposed to be home. This trick only worked before Caller I.D. His mom, either dead asleep or half-asleep, would answer the phone and he would say, “it’s okay, Mom — I got it.” She would think he was home and had answered the phone on another line, so she would hang up and go to sleep, secure in the knowledge he was home safe. Meanwhile, he was out with his friends. Wow.

Isn’t cell phone tracking these days just another version of light-up tennis shoes, or neon necklaces?

People have a lot of varying opinions about phone tracking, but it seems most parents these days use it in some form or another. I wish things were as simple as velcro-ing on those crazy light-up tennis shoes to their feet as they go out into this big, wild world. Go out into the world, but be safe. It’s like putting on a St. Christopher. We want to cloak our loved ones in a loving protection. Because they are our precious cargo.

************************************************************************

If you missed my last post, you can check it out here: Adventures In Costumes: From Superheroes to Werewolves

To subscribe to my blog (hey, thanks!), fill out the subscription box at the top right of the home page.