Battle of Wills

After a lazy morning we left the motel and drove back into town. We left the car at a parking garage and set off on foot to explore the city, which we knew next to nothing about. Shay and I quickly decided to stop at one of the bustling sidewalk cafes for lunch. Much like Chicago, Montreal is ludicrously windy. We made up our minds as to our choices and then used the various table accouterments (ashtray, salt, pepper, etc) to weigh down the menus. While we waited for the waitress, we read, since I had made sure to bring along our books (he's got one left for summer reading for school), and that was where the unpleasantness began.

I vaguely remember being twelve and then, much as now, I knew everything. Shay, too, believes he knows everything and thus my attempts at "bossing him around" were met with much resistance, namely mocking facial expressions and poorly-executed sarcasm.

After I'd seen him staring off into the great beyond, having looked at his book for a minute and a half, I tried to be pleasant. "Shay, c'mon. I'm not telling you to eat babies. Just read your book."

"What?!! I read TWO pages!"

"Yes, well, that's pathetic. Keep reading," I sternly intoned as he pursed his lips and furrowed his brow. "Boy, you don't want to do that."

"What?!!!" he exclaimed and then rolled his eyes.

"You don't want to challenge me."

"You can't do anything here," he said confidently, looking around at the various other patrons.

"Wanna bet?" I asked menacingly, before pulling out the trump card for ensuring adolescent compliance, "I have no problem with embarrassing you in front of all these people."

He looked startled and then picked the book back up. As I was wearing sunglasses, he couldn't tell if I was reading or watching him so he was forced to read. Fortunately for the little librophobe, the food came out soon thereafter and he could put the book away. Unfortunately for him, he still hadn't gotten all the uppity-ness out of his system. He'd taken approximately two bites of his pizza when I told him, yet again, to close his mouth while he chewed. He ignored me and continued to smack away.

"Boy, I'm not going to tell you again. Don't chew with your mouth open. You come from too good parents to be acting like white trash."

"Wuh?" was all he could manage to mumble through the mouthful of food.

"Stop chewing with your mouth open."

He closed his mouth and chewed civilly for a few moments but then was right back to smacking again.

"Close your mouth."

He chose the tactic of ignoring me, so I reiterated my directions, which he ignored again and tried looking off at another table. I set my knife and fork down (I wasn't eating pizza), reached over, took him by both arms as he tried to back a way, a look of horror on his open-mouth chewing face, and growled, "Close your mouth when you eat. I'm not going to tell you again."

"Ow! You need to cut your fingernails. Jeez!" he said as I let him go and went back to eating my lunch.

When he thought I wasn't looking, he took another bite of his pizza and silently opened his mouth as wide as he could, so much so that I could just barely make out his uvula trying to stay afloat against the tide of masticated greasy cheese and dough.

I set my utensils down, stood up, and told him, "Let's go. You and I are going to have a little talk."

The immediate look of "Oh crap!" was quickly masked with feigned indifference as he got up and followed me into the building. Instead of going all the way in, I stopped atrium and wheeled on him, putting both of my hands on either side of his face so that his cheeks were in my palms. The surly look vanished and fright took over as I began.

"Stop this right now. You want to be treated like an adult, then act like an adult."

He again tried to assert some control over the situation by rolling his eyes and then turning them away, as though he weren't listening to me. I increased the pressure on his cheeks, so that he looked like he were trying to squeeze his face into jar. That got his undivided attention.

"Stop. You're not going to win. Grow up. I don't like doing this. I don't like having to be unpleasant. It's ridiculous that I have to. I'm not the bad guy here. I'm just telling you to eat with your mouth closed. You got that?"

I shook my hands at the last part for emphasis. It seemed to work so I let him go and we walked back to the table, where we finished up our meal. While we ate, in silence, I longed for what my father strove for (and sometimes achieved): obedience with nothing more than a stern look and a pointed silence. After just a few days I can see how people get tired of having to keep up telling kids to do the right thing and disciplining them, and, instead, just let them run wild.

Afterwards we went to a local bookstore, which I can't resist doing when I travel, and purchased a guide to the city, among other things. From there I took him to the staple of foreign city vacations, churches. By the second cathedral, his eyes had glazed over and I was losing him. Thus, I did what any concerned chaperone should do. I ushered him out after the tour and we sat down in the local park and I went over the Reformation with him. Yes, whether he wanted it or not, he got a nice overview of plenary indulgences, Luther, the Theses, Protestantism, the counter-Reformation, and the Huguenots (from whom he is named "Porcher"). He was prepared for the lecture though. Earlier, when we'd passed a "Rubicon" Jeep, I told him about Julius Caesar and his momentous decision, the collapse of the Roman Republic, the rise of the Empire, why the Tsar and Kaiser were named thus, epilepsy, Dostoevsky, and alternative birthing methods. What twelve- year- old wouldn't be enthralled.

Despite walking him all over creation and then getting kinda-sorta lost in the subway, he didn't appear to be thrilled with Montreal. I posed to him the option of staying another day in Montreal, going out to the Canadian countryside and camping and hiking, or going back to the States and going to Niagara Falls . He jumped at Niagara Falls.

On the way back to the car he told me how much fun he was having even though everything was going badly. Finally, I had gotten through! "Yes, Life is pain and suffering and not getting what you want. If you can get used to that and even look forward to it, enjoy it, then you're going to be fine." Later on I'm going to have to go over Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Cynicism with him.

On the way out of the country I decided to stop at a restaurant so that I could burn up the rest of the Canadian currency I had and make sure that he got some form of vegetable in his system. I took along my book, having learned my lesson with Mr. Takes-An-Eternity-Eating. The menus were in French so I ordered Veal Parmigiana for him, since I saw that it came with a caesar (!) salad.

He tore into the veal and the spaghetti, but didn't touch the salad.

"Shay, you've got to eat the salad. You haven't had any vegetables for two days."

"I don't like salad."

"That's fine, but you're going to eat it. And don't think you can pull the trick where you eat the rest of it and claim you're too full to eat the salad."

He crinkled his nose, but then went back to eating the veal and spaghetti. I figured that he'd understand. By the time I'd finished my meal, he still hadn't touched the salad.

"Alright, hero. Time to eat some salad."

With a look of utter disgust he forked a few pieces of lettuce and put it in his mouth. A look of extreme nausea washed over him and he lurched his head and neck as though he were going to vomit. I smiled at him, which confused him, put a piece of bread in my mouth and reproduced the exact same performance as his.

"Oh, look. I'm allergic to bread just like you're allergic to lettuce!" Apparently he didn't find that very funny, but looked at me with pleading eyes.

"Shay, you can just stop it. I know exactly what you're going to do before you do it."

He gulped down the wretched lettuce, gasped, and then retorted, "Uh-uh! You don't know what I'm going to do."

"Yes I do."

"No you don't. You don't know what I'm going to say."

"Yes I do. I knew you'd say that." I love teasing this kid. "I was where you were before. I know all the tricks. Pretending that lettuce makes you vomit isn't going to get you out of eating it. It's just like that time when we hiked up the mountain: you dragged your feet and complained and all that happened was that it took you a lot longer to get back to the car than if you'd just sucked it up and walked normally. You're going to eat the salad. You can either eat it quickly and then eat the rest of the meal, or we can stay here until they close while you pick at it."

He gave me the defiant look again. "I just won't eat."

"Well, then I promise you that your next meal will only be a salad."

"You can't do that. You can't boss me around. You're not my parents."

"Nope, I'm not your parents. As far as you're concerned, I'm a god."

"Uh-uh."

"Well, you're my responsibility; I control when you eat and sleep and all your movements, and, most importantly, you're 1500 miles from home in a foreign country where they speak a language you don't. So, eat the salad."

He sullenly picked up the fork and went back to the distasteful chore, continuing the ruse of nausea. Nonetheless he nearly finished before he figured out his masterstroke. He forked nearly all of it into his mouth and then made extra special with the lurching and gagging.

"Ah haffa bomih (I have to vomit)," he said with his best sincerity.

I pushed him my empty pasta bowl. "There you go. Try not to miss the bowl."

He lurched a few more times, and, since I'd had an experience where I wasn't believed when I really did have to throw up (I still hate fried okra), I thought that maybe he wasn't faking. I told him to go to the bathroom. When he wasn't looking, I followed him to the restroom, just in time to hear him calmly spit, not vomit, the majority of the salad into the toilet. His content face tried to go back to looking sick when he opened up the stall and saw me standing there.

"Good trick. Now you're going to eat salad the rest of the trip."

"I really did spit up!"

"Right. Get back out there and finish the salad."

Well, I'm pleased to say, with only a minor flourish of cunning (he tried to bury the salad under the spaghetti when I wasn't looking), he managed to eat the salad and we were on our way, one hundred pages and two hours after we'd sat down. He did manage to say the following with a straight face as we were walking out of the restaurant, "I'm going to get you back for this!"

"Oh yes, I'm so terrible for making you learn basic geography, telling you to eat with your mouth closed (earlier, when I'd corrected him yet again about eating with his mouth open, he'd said, "It's not like we're eating with the queen." "No, but you're eating in front of other human beings."), and making you eat vegetables."

We crossed back into the US with no problems. I retrieved my pistol and we camped out near the Vermont/NY border.