If you are up well before the sun at 4:50am to get to Modesto for your 13 year-old’s 8:00am travel soccer game, you might be a helicopter parent.

If you passed an all-too-familiar travel baseball complex 30 minutes ago in Manteca, you might be a helicopter parent.

(If you have heard of neither Modesto nor Manteca, breathe a sigh of relief, because you are likely not a helicopter parent, at least not of the Northern California variety.)

Am I a helicopter parent? I just might be.

I don’t complain, not a peep. I’m perfectly happy to set the alarm for 4:50am. I actually open my eyes at 4:40am, momentarily panicked by the lighter-than-expected backyard mostly obscured by the window shade a couple feet from my side of the bed. I navigate the dog toy-strewn carpet to the bathroom in the pitch black. Widening my eyes like a crazy person, thinking somehow this will help me see better. Help me avoid placing my bare foot down on Wailea’s marrow bone.

I have a well-oiled routine, because I’ve done this dozens of times now over the course of the last few years. A tight schedule is committed to memory, and silently running in the background.

Max rousted shortly before 5am. His bag already packed and waiting to be lifted into the Prius with minimal effort. The pajama-clad teenager slides into the backseat, his night’s slumber only interrupted for a couple minutes. Go back to sleep.

The chopper lifts off at 5am, Modesto-bound.

I know where I need to gas up. Right across the street from a Starbucks I know to be open at 5am. A handful of homeless and jet-lagged tourists wait in line with me, briefly, staring blankly at the refrigerated juices. Coffee and breakfast sandwiches — key elements of the early am road trip routine — in-hand, I pop back into the car within 2 minutes.

By 5:06am, I’m gassed up, caffeine-ready, and en route. And ahead of schedule. Waze rewards my military-like precision with a projected 10-minute arrival time cushion before the obligatory 7am show up.

The boy sleeps, snoring loudly enough that I glance back at him, thinking he’s joking. Not joking, just in deep sleep. Sweet dreams.

We pull in to the soccer “complex” — vaguely reminiscent of the maximum security prisons and military grade trucking depots nearby — with plenty of time to spare. And of course that time is already accounted for. Ten minutes is about what it takes for me to jumpstart my teenager, prodding him to finish his cold breakfast sandwich and $4 orange juice (best enjoyed by October 1, 2014). And even allotting him 30 seconds for an anxious search for his missing shinguard, his panic ultimately proving unfounded (as always).

His cleat bottoms touch down on the parking lot pavement at 6:55am. Four-dollar orange juice dangling from his fingers, shuffling towards the complex’s front gate, decked out in his team’s red uniform kit.

Mission Accomplished.

If any of this sounds familiar, you just might be a helicopter parent too.

Thanks for reading.

Everett’s first-ever travel baseball tournament game starts in 30 minutes. He’s been to this particular complex in Sunnyvale a couple dozen times. All as a spectator. Watching his big brother, who lives to be watched.

Everett does not live to be watched. He’s happiest when the spotlight is on someone else.

On the car ride down here this morning, he offered up an out-of-the blue observation about the merits of low expectations. If this were my older son, Max, I may have launched into a tirade, possibly laced with expletives, and likely including ample references to data points like the 5:50am wakeup call, the $50 “baseball bag” with neoprene bat sleeves purchased just yesterday, and the fact that I got along just fine with cut-off long underwear when I played and didn’t need high end “sliding shorts.”

But Ev isn’t Max, as I’m learning still, so I had to follow a different approach altogether. And it’s not one that comes naturally. Not to me, at least.

I paused for a beat or two, checked again the distance until our exit off 101 according to Waze, and rolled the dice, keenly aware that if I blew this, Ev would refuse to get out of the car when we pulled into the parking lot.

“Well, if we all settled for low expectations, think of all the things that would never have been accomplished. No one would have invented cars. There would be no Internet. No Olympic Games. No man on the moon. So it’s actually good to have high expectations, to challenge yourself, because that’s how you grow, how you learn what you’re made of, how you find the best in yourself, and maybe you’ll find that you can do things you didn’t think you could do.”

Pretty good, right? And I think this is basically verbatim. As if I pulled the “Low Expectations Talk” index card out of the Fatherly Advice packet and read from it after clearing my throat (and of course without lowering the quality of my freeway driving).

And from the backseat? Crickets. Nothing. I half-expected a gasp, maybe a gasp plus applause and a “Bravo!” shouted by my red-faced and profoundly inspired 8 year-old.

Um, yeah. No.

I soldiered on, kept my legs moving, shucked and jived. Instead of high-minded inspiration about the evolution of mankind, I went for something more visceral.

I suspected (correctly) that Ev was perseverating about getting plunked on the back at last night’s practice by an errant throw from catcher to first base while Ev was running to 1st base himself. No doubt the bruise on his right shoulder blade still smarted, pressed as he was into the backseat. I needed a strong visual to capture Everett’s attention, snap him out of this pre-game funk, pull him back from dangling over the precipice by his fingertips.

Enter Tony C.

I pulled up the famously grotesque Tony Conigliaro Sports Illustrated cover. Then I handed my iPhone and Tony’s bulging, purple eye socket over my shoulder to Everett.

“Woah, look at that black eye! Wow!”

Mission Accomplished.

Everett was now recalibrated and ready to go. His memory banks wiped clean. Not a care in the world. All it took was a little blood and gore. Whatever works.

Thanks for reading.

From the backseat the other afternoon whilst shooting towards the Golden Gate Bridge on the 101 South:

Ev:  “Dad, I wish there was such a thing as a ‘Gravity Bill.'”

Me:  [Pausing to digest this tidbit, searching my distracted brain, half-panicked trying not to reveal how much more intelligent my 8 year-old is than I.] “Oh?  Why?”

Ev:  “Because I wouldn’t pay the bill.” 

Me: [Realizing immediately that the jig is up, once again.  I haven’t the slightest idea where he is going with this, and our intellectual chain of command is so fragile.  Creaking loudly and about to snap altogether.]  “Oh? Why not?”

Ev:  “Because I want to float around, not be stuck with gravity.”

Me: [At once both proud of my 3rd grader’s flexible mind and disappointed in the fact that this line of thinking has never occurred to me.  I whisper, hopefully not audibly, “Damnit!!”] “Yeah, that would be cool, huh?” [Then I try to regain my footing, to catch up with him, to show that I am a worthy brainiac companion.] “Although, whom would we pay?  The city?  The County of San Francisco?  Planet Earth?”

And then the moment was gone.  Everett has paused long enough to give me a glimpse of his mind’s inner workings.  Just to let me know that his being quiet back there does not mean he’s contemplating the right moment to pick his nose undetected.  Some deep thoughts going on back there.  Far deeper than the thoughts going on in the driver’s seat.  At least when I’m the one doing the driving.

These exchanges — infrequent and brief, but powerful — remind me how woefully unequipped I am to provide my children with a fertile environment in which to exercise their minds.  By the way, as if to underscore this point, I first typed “inequipped” in that previous sentence, before being scolded by the dotted red underline for my grammatical ineptitude.  (At least I got “ineptitude” right all by myself.) 

We are all four together pretty much only at dinnertime.  By then, I’m tired.  Beat from juggling consulting work with a number of interesting clients.  Truly interesting work, stimulating, and with neat companies.  But it sometimes feels like I’m jamming a week’s worth of work into a few hours of intense hammering away.  Somewhere in there I will have managed to walk the dog a few times.  Maybe even a longer walk in the Presidio, say, where it feels like she might actually be getting the run she needs.  And usually I will have managed to break a sweat of my own, hopping on the lightly-rusted spin bike, slipping into the Bay, or going for a short run on rickety legs.  Some element of carpooling, to-practice driving, or bus stop pickup will come into play.  And then I have learned to really enjoy prepping dinner.  I have a very limited array of dinner options I know how to make, but it’s my array, and I’ve become fairly dependable within my own, narrow culinary parameters.  And I’ve also somehow gotten very interested in the table setting stuff — table runners, chargers, cool little napkin rings, the whole sh-bang.  Dunno how I fell into that, but fall I have. 

Net net, by the time I lower my 46 year-old carcass into my dining table chair, I’m pretty much spent.  Done. Functioning on only the barest of brain functions.  Relying on my autonomic nervous system to keep taking air into my lungs.  Not exactly prime time, then, for being the fantastic, engaging Dad I fancy myself.  Particularly in this age of omnipresent digital screens, dinner time time is supposed to be the time.  The best time.  For engaging in true face-to-face conversation.  The tribe reconnecting over the fire at the end of the day to share stories and continue an ancient oral tradition. 

If we were a tribe, and if I were sitting near the fire, I would smell something burning, realizing 30 seconds too late that my heel is scorched and blistered.  And probably grossed out that I had been thinking “hmm, something smells good, did I cook that?” only moments earlier. 

So like I said, tired.  And once again, probably guilty of setting unrealistic expectations, too.  Guilty of that, for sure.

Fortunately, I’m wide awake and reasonably alert at 8am, which is when I write.  Blog, I mean.  And sitting here now, clear-headed (sort of), it occurs to me that the opportunities to noodle over the pluses and minuses of gravity are all around us.  Happening all the time.  They can’t be curated or conjured up on demand.  They just happen.  And that’s the fun of it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find that damned Gravity Bill.  I have a nagging suspicion it hasn’t been paid this month, and all hell will break loose.

Thanks for reading.