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Come Sail Away with Captain Dad by Kristen Twedt
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Rated "G" by the Author.
"Boat to Boat" Voted the Best Game Ever
“Come Sail Away with Captain Dad”
Our daughter beseeched us to entertain her.
“Can we do something, like play cards? Watch a movie? Go somewhere?”
My husband and I lay motionless atop the bed covers. It was Saturday. It was cold out, the skies were gray and it seemed obvious to us that the only reasonable form of entertainment would be to leisurely watch the back of our eyelids.
She persisted.
“Come on! I’m bored. Get up. We need to DO something.”
Somebody groaned. The dogs whimpered. They were already piled high on the bed with us in various states of unconscious indulgence.
“I tell you what,” her dad offered. “Let’s play ‘Boat to Boat.’”
She stomped off, disgusted, while we erupted in unbridled glee and recalled the birth of the best game ever invented.
Her dad concocted “Boat to Boat” when our three-year-old daughter insisted that nothing would do but an activity that involved Dad. He is clever in the ways of creative play, especially those things that buy him an extended period of undisturbed recliner time.
He taught her to hammer nails into a block of wood. She’d say she was building a fort, a doghouse, maybe a barn. Her craftsmanship always produced the same splintered remains of a hacked-off 2 x 4 pierced haphazardly with crooked nails, but it kept her busy for an hour or more. He gave her a rod and reel and showed her how to cast a rubber worm. This worked great until the line got caught or the dog ran off with the bait.
“Boat to Boat” came about one of those lazy Saturdays when the week at work had left him ready for nothing but some serious R & R. He stretched out for a nap. Katie arrived, wide-eyed and eager to play.
“Whatcha doin’, Dad?”
“Oh, I was just thinking. Thinking about a nice long nap.”
“Dad, I wanna play. Let’s play something. Whatcha wanna play?”
“I have an idea,” he said sleepily. “How about we pretend this bed is a boat.”
She pondered the proposition.
“OK, we’re in a boat. Now what?”
“Uh, I think we’ll need some stuff for our boat. How about you go get us some stuff?”
She squealed delightedly and he retreated to the captain’s quarters. She had an open invitation to drag everything she owned from her room to ours. Her dimples popped like those of a game show host, and she ran off to raid her toy box.
Hours later, I discovered them both charting the depths of some faraway ocean, the covers pulled up around their chins. He had donned an authentic captain’s hat. They were taking drags on huge plastic cigars and resembled a pair of mobsters who had just looted Toys R Us.
“What in the world happened in here?”
Captain Dad replied with incredulous surprise.
“Well, we’ve been playing ‘Boat to Boat,’ of course,” he informed me.
“Yeah, we call dis ‘Boat to Boat,’ Mommy. It’s wots and wots of fun.” The first mate snuggled up to the captain, trading her cigar for a pile of Mardi Gras beads.
“And who is going to swab the deck, I mean, clean up this mess?”
Just like that, they both fell asleep, oblivious to everything except the soothing sensation of their seaworthy vessel rocking atop the deep water of some calm and gentle sea. It was the first of many “Boat to Boat” adventures where Captain Dad always seemed to sail them directly into the Bay of Lost Consciousness.
On that more recent Saturday, we discovered that “Boat to Boat” has since lost its appeal with the first mate. The captain, however, now sails with a crew of poodles. Sometimes, the call of gulls and the lure of open water fill me with a serious need to join them. When they’ve settled into a satisfied slumber, I set the anchor, take a deep breath of clean salt air, and sail away, too. I agree with the Captain. It’s one of the best games he ever invented.
Homer's Ill Iliad & Odd Sea Odyssey (420 pages) is an adult satire/parody rewrite of the classic stories of the 10 year Trojan War and of the 10 year adventure of Odysseus trying to return home to his native Ithaca.
