a captive audience

There are so many ways to avoid communicating and communing. The idiot box, the computer--there is very often something blaring between me and the person I'd most like to talk to. So I try to hoodwink the boychild or the bf into doing something with me in places where there is no access to electricity. The ipod was a brief problem, but that was dealt a swift blow with my amazing skills at giving the stink-eye.

When the boys were younger, I used to strap them in life vests and take them out in a canoe on a small lake near here. There was no escape from the canoe. There was nothing to do in the canoe except talk to each other, maybe fish. This, I learned, was one way to steal an audience away from the magnetic attraction of television. They even enjoyed themselves a little bit. But eventually they get onto my tricks and I have to move on to new tricks.

My latest efforts at getting anyone in my family to "go on a walk with me", which worked for a year or so, have met with rejection. I swear it just gets harder and harder to drag them out. If I can force them out on one of my "death marches", we actually talk to each other and it's very nice. So now that the walks are failing in incite interest, my most recent technique for getting a little un-plugged time with my 15.5 year old (before he gets his driver's license and friends with driver's licenses and can more easily escape my grasp) is to let him ride his skateboard while I jog along beside him. It's less uncool, apparantly, than just walking with one's mother. I get a little excercise, he practices his skateboard moves, we talk, we laugh, it's all good. On these beautiful early summer evenings, we've gone to an urban bike trail where he can skateboard and I can jog, and near the end of the trail there is a Target and an ice cream place, making it even more palatable to the man cub. He's more interested in a walk/jog/skate if there is a destination and not just pointless circling around. And once again, I find a way to pull my loved one from the jaws of utter slothfullness and the land of endless re-runs.