The word “holiday” conjures up images of rest, relaxation and catching up on all that stuff you can’t seem to get done during a normal week. Well, I don’t know about y’all, but I’m so tired from my “holiday”, I can hardly hold my eyes open. I need a couple of days of vacation just to recuperate, and I can’t get my pants buttoned.
In four days, we had two Thanksgiving dinners, one Aggie Bonfire, and one high school playoff game. Let us all be thankful that all we have to do now is go to work.
My kids had never been to the Bonfire, so trying to be good Aggie parents, we planned this trek for a long time. My I2-year-old daughter thought the whole idea of seventy thousand people at a pep rally was unbelievable; the 11-year-old son was in it for the pyromania. All boys love fire, especially when they’ve had a hand in starting it. Give a boy a lighter or some matches and you will have a big fire soon. I figure this is why there is a Bonfire at A&M — it used to be an all-male school, so it makes sense that they would end up spending seven weeks building the biggest pile of wood in the world just to light it and see it burn.
My 17-year-old daughter came along for one reason: to see all the hunks. It didn’t take long for us to cause her great embarrassment. First of all, according to her, she was the only teenager there with her parents … a fate worse than death when you’re trying to attract the opposite sex. To make matters worse, we were afraid of losing each other in the mass of humanity, so had to hook fingers into each other’s belt loops to stay together. There were trains like this weaving in and out everywhere, but of course, all the rest were all college students. To be hooked onto a parent’s belt loop … oh, how she longed to be rid of us!
Amazingly, we ran into some people we knew, including a couple of A&M freshmen. They invited my daughter to hang with them, and you have never seen such a quick exit. The “mom” in me started asking questions like “Do you need some money?” (the answer is always yes), and “Do you need a jacket?” (ultra-embarrassing). I finally shut up and watched as my daughter disappeared into the sea of testosterone.
She’ll be a college freshman next year and will be doing all this stuff all the time without me knowing about it. I think I’ll just put a pillowcase over my head for the next four years.
Please let me know when I can come out again.
