Field Trip Chaperone

It was time for my five-year-old son’s field trip to the Museum of Science in downtown Raleigh.  I’d signed up to drive, and I knew  from our autumn field trip to the corn maze, that a teacher might ride with me.  That meant, of course, I must vacuum out our SUV so the teacher wouldn’t be totally appalled upon stepping into our family vehicle.  With three sons, I never knew what I’d find when I got in there. 

I’d planned to take the SUV by one of those auto spa places beforehand and make sure it had a good cleaning.  But, as often happens, I never had time to do that.  So the night before the field trip, I remembered the cleaning I’d planned to do right at bedtime. In the interest of time, I decided to focus on the front of the vehicle since the teacher would be sitting up front.  I dusted off the front seat interior and picked up major items like empty Gatorade bottles, juice boxes, and discarded kid’s meal toys.  I gathered up dirty socks and DVD boxes (you haven’t lived until you drive to Disney while your five-year-old repeatedly watches “Frosty the Snowman” on the car DVD player).

In the other seats, there were still lots of bits and pieces of trash in the carpet and gunk in the little holes where the seats were adhered to the floor.  But the teacher would never see that, just some other five-year-olds who wouldn’t notice or care. 

The plan was to drop off our children as usual and then those driving on the trip would come back an hour later to pick up everybody.  When I dropped Jason off, the teacher gave each of the drivers a list of who was riding with them.  I scanned the list and stopped cold in my tracks.  BOTH teachers were riding with me.  Holy cow, that meant one of them would have to sit in – (insert music from “Psycho” here) the middle seat. The middle seat where they would have a perfect angle to see the melted lollipops stuck in the cup holders and sunflower seeds (the ‘must-have’ snack of all youth baseball players) imbedded in the carpet. 

When I got back to my SUV, I jumped in and immediately headed to the self-car wash down the street.  The huge vacuum cleaner there only took quarters but thank God, I had a ton of them. 

I’d have to work fast.  I popped in two quarters and crawled in the back, pulling the enormous vacuum cleaner hose behind me.  A few minutes later, the vacuum stopped so I had to climb out and put in two more quarters.  After ten minutes of twisting and turning throughout the SUV and squeezing underneath seats, I’d worked up a sweat.  But, my work was productive.  I found a long-lost athletic cup wedged under the back seat.  I sighed, remembering the hour-long search we had for the thing before my middle son’s baseball game.  It must have fallen out of his equipment bag at some point.

The carpet wasn’t totally clean, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.  I pulled out a bottle of cleaner from the back and sprayed it on the sides and backs of the seats, hoping the drips of long-ago dried drinks would come off okay.  Some did, some didn’t. 

I looked at my watch and knew I had to get back to the school.  I opened all the doors to the vehicle and swung each of them back and forth to air it out so it wouldn’t smell like cleaning fluid. 

Then it was back to the school.  Both teachers and the kids got into my SUV, and I held my breath as the teacher who climbed in the back seat glanced briefly around as she got in.  Her facial expression didn’t show disgust so I’d pulled off the impossible. 45 minutes earlier the place was a pigsty. 

As we neared the museum, I turned on my blinker to turn into the parking lot only to see a sign saying the lot was full.  I suddenly felt nauseated because this meant one thing – parallel parking. 

Let’s suffice it to say that parallel parking is not one of my talents, particularly in the SUV.  There are two kinds of people in the world:  those who can skillfully and without panic parallel park any vehicle in a small space and those who would do anything to keep from having to parallel park (especially under the watchful eye of teachers).  I’d be marked off the chaperone list for good.  For a moment, I considered dropping everyone in front of the museum, claiming I didn’t want them to have to walk too far, and then parking in a lot five blocks away. 

But then, there it was:  a parking space without another car immediately in front of it.  “Oh, there’s a good spot,” one teacher shouted.  I slowed down, as I looked in my rearview mirror and saw nobody was behind me.  Was I really going to attempt this??  I’d always been intimidated by the whole concept of parallel parking because obviously with all the backing and turning at specific angles, there was some geometry involved.  Let’s suffice it to say geometry was not my best subject in school. Yet, the slogan in the Nike commercials popped into my mind:  Just do it.  I pulled beside the car in front of the empty space (about a space and a half in front the spot) and backed up, turning the wheel until, to my surprise, the SUV was parked perfectly in the space. I felt like a little league baseball outfielder who dives to catch the ball and doesn’t realize the ball landed in his glove until the crowd starts cheering. 

“Okay, let’s get the lunches out of the back,” one teacher said, as I did a double take to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.  But the SUV was right where it should be and I hadn’t hit anything.  If I didn’t accomplish anything else the rest of the month, that’d be okay.  This feeling of achievement was enough to carry me through. 

I got out of the car, my legs weak, but acted like I parallel parked every day.  I stood back and tried to nonchalantly admire my handiwork.  If only my husband, Kevin, could have been there to see this. I wished I had a camera to prove it to him.

The museum that day offered many wonders of nature, but none more amazing that the feat I pulled off.  Unfortunately, I do have to admit that this occurrence gave me a false sense of confidence in my parking abilities.  A few days later, I decided to use my newfound skill again. As I tried to whip the SUV into a parallel space, I almost sideswiped another car on my left.  So I gave up and parked farther down the street, leaving the prime parking space for someone braver and more coordinated than I. 

The next time I volunteer to drive on a field trip, I’ll clean the SUV from top to bottom — just in case.  And I’ll make sure the destination is nowhere near downtown but somewhere there is a parking lot with plenty of empty spaces.  Field trips are educational for kids, but sometimes parents learn a thing or two, also.

Sharon J. O’Donnell is an award-winning newspaper columnist, who specializes in  humor columns.  Since 1998, Sharon has been a columnist for The Cary News, in Cary, NC (just outside of Raleigh) and has won awards for those columns.  She has also written for Good Housekeeping, The News & Observer, and Blue Mountain Arts greeting cards. 

Sharon is a 1984 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (she used to live in the same dorm as Michael Jordan!!) with a degree in print/broadcast journalism.  Since then she’s worked in radio promotions, special events planning, public speaking, and public relations.

Her current project is a humorous book of essays about what it’s like to be the only woman in a houseful of males, dealing with a husband, three sons, and a male dog. 

Sharon also writes fiction.  In 1997, her novel manuscript, Hand-Me-Downs, was a finalist in the Heekin Group Foundation’s James Fellowship for the novel-in-progress division.  An excerpt from her current novel-in-progress, Bluebirds Fly, was published in the Sunday Reader section of The News & Observer, the Raleigh paper, in December of 2002.  In the spring of 2003, she won third place in the short story division of The Paul Gillette Memorial Writing Contest, sponsored by the Pikes Peak Writers Conference..

Since 2000, she’s taught narrative writing through week-long writing residency workshops in schools and is a writer-in-residence through the United Arts Council.  She has also done public relations consulting that has resulted in successful media coverage for various programs and events.

Jacob’s Ladder, a volunteer group she helped start in honor of her nephew who underwent a successful bone marrow transplant in 1993, won a national award called the HOPE award in 1997 for raising testing money and promoting the bone marrow registry to minorities.

She lives in Cary with her husband Kevin and their three sons ages 14, 11, and 5 (ages of this writing in late 2005).

Her Websites are www.momsofboys.org and www.sharonodonnell.com.