CADE'S PARTY

The following piece was the result of a particularly frazzling day with my five-year-old version of Evan. It ran in a 2000 issue of Cleveland Magazine.

David Searls

You won’t find mug shots of Evan and me on those ubiquitous coupon postcards under the heading, “Have You Seen Us?” Unlike the kidnapping parents who glare back at me from my mailbox, I haven’t the slightest notion that my five-year-old would flourish in a solo parenting environment. Experience teaches me daily that to have anything resembling a normal life, Evan desperately needs the contributions of my right brain and his mother’s left.

Last summer was at its height when I got a call from Laura. “I just got off the phone with Cade’s mom,” she said, sounding just a bit perplexed.

“Uhhh huh,” I replied slowly as I turned her words over and over in my head: Cade’s mom . . . Cade’s mom . . . Somewhere in the darkest, bleakest recesses of my consciousness, a bell almost went off.

“She’s wondering if Evan’s coming to Cade’s birthday party. She hadn’t heard from us, and it’s this Saturday.”

Ah, that Cade’s mom. The one whose son is in Evan’s pre-kindergarten class. I latched onto the distant memory of an invitation arriving by mail and a quick glance at a calendar telling me the date was a weekend Evan would be with me. There’d be no need to tell Laura. I could handle the situation myself. All I had to do was RSVP, but there’d be plenty of time for that.

“Uh, right,” I said to my ex-wife. “Cade’s birthday party. You’re sure it’s this Saturday?”

She was sure. “Since you didn’t respond, Cade’s mom was following up.”

“We’ll be there,” I said in a voice that I hoped conveyed breezy confidence. My mind tried picturing potential scheduling conflicts, but drew a blank. Not that that’s unusual.

“I suppose you don’t have a gift yet,” Laura said. A statement, not a question.

“Well, I was thinking . . . ”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got one from a party we had to skip. It’s wrapped and everything.”

As parents, we each have our talents. I tell our son stories and read to him and take him on outdoor adventures. We play ball, dig for worms, turn burps into phrases, and re-enact Star Wars scenes with cardboard giftwrap tube light sabers. We overrun bedtimes, ride bikes in the rain and occasionally forget birthday parties.

But that’s alright, because part of Laura’s job description is to remember bath schedules, gage fevers with the palm of her hand, combine clothing articles into outfits and relay the number and frequency of tablespoons (or is it teaspoons?) when medicine must be doled out. All of which she does with aplomb. If she believes I need more supervision than our child, she never says so. Not to my face, anyway.

“Don’t forget, swim class starts at 9:05,” she reminded me when she called that Friday evening. It was a new class at a new time and location, and I masked my irritation at an event that had to start five minutes after the hour just to rattle me. “Cade’s party’s at ten,” Laura continued. “They’ll be playing in the sprinkler, so I‘ll bring along an extra pair of swim trunks and we’ll change him in the locker room. You might be a few minutes late, but I’ve already told Cade’s mom and it’s not a problem.”

Then came detailed directions to the Y in the Cleveland suburb where the class would be held the following morning, and the best route to Cade’s house, which was in my suburb, but on a nearby street I’d never heard of.

“Are you writing this down?” she asked.

“Yep,” I said, wondering where I’d find a pen.

After breakfast on Saturday, I gave Evan the bath I’d obligated us to the night before, but there’d been ice cream and a rocket ship ride on the porch swing that lasted past bedtime. Although he was on his way to what amounted to a huge, chlorinated bathtub, I realized that his mother would know if I took such a shortcut. She’d just know.

So the morning bath set our schedule back a half hour, and my heart skittering at my first premonitions of trouble as we raced to the car with less than fifteen minutes until splashdown. Seven minutes later I was, miraculously, at least in the right 'burb, but wondering which of the three choices of exits Laura had directed me toward.

“Oh God,” I muttered.

“Are we lost?” Evan asked cheerfully.

“Of course not,” I replied. Information like that has a way of getting back to Mom.

Then I remembered that, although this was Evan’s first class, he and his mother had gone swimming at that YMCA before. “Hey, Ev,” I asked as casually as I could under the rapidly deteriorating situation, “do you remember what your swim class building looks like?”

“Um, no. Are we lost?”

I mumbled something that made me feel as reassuring as Amelia Earhart’s navigator. Then another thought struck like a wet towel—an appropriate simile.

“Ev, the last time you went here with Mom, did the people who work there give you a towel?”

“No.” Then the full ramifications of my question apparently set in. “We don’t have any towels?”

“I can’t talk right now. I have to drive.”

Laura met us at the door with a big, fluffy towel. Classes were running late and we were on time.
Afterward, as we dried Evan’s hair and got him changed into dry swim shorts, Laura shoved her regifted party gift into my hand and made me repeat the directions she’d given me the night before.

I rolled my eyes. “West 140th Street exit to Warren Road, left on Warren.” Then I went on to recite in perfect detail the route to the party.

How hopeless did she think I was?



“Are we lost?”

“Of course not,” I said.

The party was in Lakewood, my own neck of the woods, Cade’s house less than five minutes from my own. How could we be lost? I took the left on Warren, then another at the very next street. Only, that second left had dumped me onto a road with a name unlike the one in the directions still coursing through my head. Still, I found the right house by weaving in and out of residential streets until I ran out of wrong addresses.

It was off Alger, not Warren, I smugly told myself.

“Cool. They got Chief Wahoo!” Evan cried as our eyes tracked the crudely drawn birthday party signs tacked onto telephone poles to what was, presumably, Cade’s driveway. At the top of the drive stood a cardboard cutout of the Cleveland Indians’ mascot.

Which wiped the smug smile clean from my face as one small and foreboding detail of the invitation tickled my mind. It was to be a theme party, guests wearing their favorite Tribe clothing or at least something sporting the red, white and blue team colors. I turned to my son in back and my glance fell morosely to his green t-shirt and khaki shorts.

“Where are we going, Da?” Evan wondered as our car lurched forward, leaving Cade’s home and Chief Wahoo in the dust.

“We’ll be right back,” I promised with as much jauntiness as I could muster. Back home, I grabbed two officially sanctioned team ballcaps of widely contrasting sizes.

“Ouch, you’re hurting my head!” Evan complained as I tried to squeeze his skull into the smaller one.

Funny, it had fit him fine when he was two. My second choice settled around his eyebrows, drawing yet another complaint from my irritable offspring. There had been another cap which had fit him perfectly the day we lost it. I hadn’t had Evan’s head with me when I went shopping for its replacement, but I’d figured that if the new cap was a little big he’d grow into it someday.

Someday had not come. My son would be the party oddball, inappropriately clad, and clutching a hand-me-down gift that I could only hope would befit a five-year-old male.

“Alright, Evan,” I sighed, defeated, “let’s go to the party.”

Maybe I could make it look like I was taking a stand with my son’s attire, refusing to denigrate Native Americans with the buffoonish team caricature and politically incorrect nickname. My only hope, it seemed, was as an activist party pooper.

Laura would have committed the invitation to memory. She would have laid out his outfit the night before. She would have bought Cade’s gift the previous weekend, and mapquested her course before backing the car down the drive. Of course, if my ex hadn’t misdirected me onto Warren Road rather than Alger I might have had an extra minute to paw through Evan’s dirty clothes for something red, something blue.

My spirits picked up at the party . There were others as out-of-theme as Evan, and none of his friends seemed to know or care what anyone else was wearing. Cade loved all of his gifts, including ours—whatever we got him—and Evan and I left tired and sweaty and wet and satisfied with the day.

Until I checked my voice mail. Laura had apparently called soon after we’d left swim class.

“It just dawned on me that when you were going over the directions to Cade’s house you said you’d take the first left onto Warren. But it’s Alger, not Warren. I hope you find it alright.”

Which is why you’ll never see Evan and me among the missing on those postcard mailers. Unless we innocently lose our way to swim class one morning.