Thank You

The kid next door was trying to put together a tent. He had a couple of buddies with him. He was waving the instructions around and reciting the directions: "Insert part "Q" into part w etc." I was standing in my own backyard with my very old Labrador retriever "Roscoe" who was for his own part reading the instructions from the grass.

The kid with the assembly list suddenly said: "That’s why I was never a Boy Scout!"

"Thank you," I said, softly, smiling with a bouquet of rue in mind. "That’s why I was never a Boy Scout, indeed."

I was never a Boy Scout; and never destined to be a railroad engineer or a shortstop…

Still, back in 1962 I begged my mother to let me join the Cub Scouts.

My mother knew that owing to my blindness I was going to have an uphill struggle and accordingly she also joined the Cub Scouts as a "Den Mother". She probably figured that in this way she could foster activities that I might be able to do. She also knew that I had already been the target of bullies who had taken it upon themselves to hurl insults at me because I couldn’t see. I think she imagined she could control the drama if she was the designated mother of us all.

We made our own popsicles with Dixie cups and we dunked for apples. We made "wampum" belts with Indian beads. We sang songs about bears. We played harmonicas. We wore little blue uniforms and we went to assemblies where we received cloth badges that our mothers would sew onto our shirts.

In short: it was terrible.

Pretty soon we were begging my mother to just let us go out into the woods.

My mother had run out of activities that I could do and she was tired of us all. She gave us her blessing. And we were gone.

We ruined our uniforms by crawling through the trees and climbing rocks. We threw pine cones and pretended they were hand grenades and we were deep inside Nazi territory.

When the other mothers came to pick up their sons they saw one boy who was missing a shirt sleeve. Another had lost his epaulets. Several had torn pants. One kid was minus a shoe. We were covered in pine pitch and dirt. We were sweaty and we stank. We were ecstatic. We were still shooting each other with sticks.

Of course those were expensive uniforms and in those days you had to order them from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and it took several weeks to assemble the whole getup and we had managed to lose our kerchiefs and the little gold rings shaped like wolves that held the kerchiefs in place and one of us had thrown away his expensive belt by pretending it was a flame thrower and not one of us still had his little hat—we had collectively burned a huge assortment of our expensive military regalia.

That was the end of Cub scouts. My mother was summarily dismissed. But I was for one brief dazzling moment on the frontline of boyhood without bullies or tedious rules.

Thanks Mom!

S.K.

Comments

[fridawrites]

What a great mom you have. Too bad her position was short lived!

We have at least two children in our pack with autism and Asperger's, and one fifth grader last year used a wheelchair (he's now graduated). With our children's dads as "den mothers" (and one of those dads has dyslexia and is a teacher), Cub Scouts has fortunately worked for our sons and been accommodating for them. Without it, they'd not have developed the close friendships they have. I'm also glad to see that one city troop is accommodating lesbian parents (no one's going to tell the national office) and others, atheist parents.

I don't think the boy who used the wheelchair was as well accommodated, mostly from a lack of people's perceptions about needs. In addition, it's difficult if not impossible to get one wheelchair seat when you purchase group tickets for the 2-3 sporting events attended a year--wheelchair seating is often entirely separate. Now that we're on planning committees, we can more easily ask and assist with accommodations.

I enjoy your recollections. I often wonder what it's like for my son.

[william Peace]

As former Cub Scout Den leader and currently an assistant scout master I consider your mom an "anti-scout". This is not a criticism, quite the contrary, it is the highest compliment I could give. Years ago when my son joined the Cub Scouts I was asked to be a leader--a sure sign the scouts were desperate for volunteers. At no point did parents or the BSA itself ever try to be inclusive to me as a parent that used a wheelchair. In fact, parents and the Cub Scout pack were aggressively discriminatory. Luckily for me and my son all those that did not fit in were placed in the den I was selected to lead. We social and physical misfits considered ourselves to be anti-scouts. I encouraged all the boys to get as dirty as humanly possible and with another leader we took them camping on a regular basis. We never did fit in (not that we wanted to) and yet in retrospect I suspect we had far more fun than our picture perfect peers.