I was working on a manuscript last night when I heard my oldest son on the phone in the other room.<\/p>\n
“Can you come to our fire tonight? We’re going to roast marshmallows and make s’mores.”<\/p>\n
“What?” I ran out into his room. “What did you just say?”<\/p>\n
“I was just inviting a friend to our fire.”<\/p>\n
“Are we having a fire?” I asked. My wife was out of the picture, taking a final exam for her Statistics class.<\/p>\n
“I thought it would be fun.”<\/p>\n
“Okay. How fun? How many people did you invite?”<\/p>\n
He took a moment to count to himself. “Six families.”<\/p>\n
“I see.” I checked my phone to see what time it was: five o’clock. “What time is this fire that we’re having with our friends?”<\/p>\n
“I don’t know.”<\/p>\n
I dropped my manuscript on a chair. “Call ’em back. Make it 6:30. Get your brother. We’ve got some shopping to do.”<\/p>\n
By 6pm, we were back at the house. I was building a fire in the pit on the driveway, while the kids raced to get chairs set up. I’d picked up fried chicken and a giant baguette at the supermarket for dinner.<\/p>\n
Once the fire was started, I left my oldest to watch it while I went inside to fill my camp coffee pot with water. When I came back, the first of the friends had showed up.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t have any dinner,” he said.<\/p>\n
I nestled the pot of water among the burning logs. “Well, grab some fried chicken and rip off a hunk of bread.”<\/p>\n
“Rip what?”<\/p>\n
I held out the baguette to him. “Grab a piece, rip it off, and start chewing.”<\/p>\n
“I can do that?”<\/p>\n
“Honestly, I don’t know.”<\/p>\n
He grinned, ripped off a huge piece and stuffed it in his mouth.<\/p>\n
The kids continued to arrive, until there were eleven of them, ranging in age from 7 to 12. The chicken disappeared incredibly quickly. So did the bread. I cooked camp hot chocolate, and pointed them toward the marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers.<\/p>\n
“How many can we have?” one asked.<\/p>\n
“Well,” I said, pouring hot water into a styrofoam cup of cocoa powder. “We’ve got what we’ve got. Once it’s gone, there isn’t any more.”<\/p>\n
“I dropped some crackers!”<\/p>\n
“Did I mention that’s all we have?” I asked.<\/p>\n
Suddenly, the kids understood. I may have been the only adult there, but I wasn’t making the rules. We had what we had, and we could have fun, or we could not. It was up to us to make the best of it.<\/p>\n
And they did. There was no fighting or bickering, no “I wanted that marshmallow” or “that’s my cocoa!” Instead, we roasted marshmallows, shared jokes, and told campfire stories. Someone found a football and they threw that around for a while, then came back to the fire for more hanging out. I stayed at the fire, of course, and made sure everyone was safe.<\/p>\n
It was, all in all, a ton of fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just a slice of life story today, about an old-fashioned campfire with a bunch of new-fangled kids. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-DJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}