A couple Sundays ago, I found myself\u00a0killing time in the middle of a church social function. I don’t do terribly well at\u00a0social functions. It’s always been a weak point of mine. \u00a0I’m not very good at making small talk with strangers, and, since I’m\u00a0aware of that, a weird sort of tension builds within me. It’s like I expect someone to point me out and shout “you do not know what you’re doing!”<\/p>\n
Fortunately, I was at this particular social function\u00a0with the rest of my family.<\/p>\n
My wife was doing her thing, of course, chatting happily with all comers, the center of a circle of social goodness.<\/p>\n
As predictably successful as she was being, my oldest son was off fulfilling his own stereotype:\u00a0filling plate after plate of food from the spread of chips, meatballs and chicken wings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That left my youngest son and I, standing on the periphery, trying to figure out how to deal with all the strangers who were politely ignoring us.<\/p>\n
We played some rock-paper-scissors, then started\u00a0trying to guess what\u00a0other people were talking about.<\/p>\n
As he turned to my side to see someone that I had nodded toward, the top of his head brushed the hand of the person behind me. He ducked away, quickly, his eyes wide.<\/p>\n
“Look at how tall he is,” he whispered. “He’s a giant!”<\/p>\n
I glanced over my shoulder. The guy behind me was at least a foot taller than me, probably two.<\/p>\n
“He’s as much taller\u00a0than me as I am taller than you,” I whispered back to my son.<\/p>\n
“Think he’s seven feet?”<\/p>\n
“Or more” I said. “Wait. I have an idea. Want to get on my shoulders?”<\/p>\n
His eyes widened. “Think we’ll be taller than he is?”<\/p>\n
“I don’t know.”<\/p>\n
“Let’s do it!”<\/p>\n
I knelt down, he climbed up onto my shoulders, and I stood up. “Try to act casual,” I whispered.<\/p>\n
He started giggling.<\/p>\n
I\u00a0worked my way in a slow circle through the crowd and back to the super-tall guy.<\/p>\n
“I think he’s still taller,” my son whispered.<\/p>\n
“Why don’t I walk up to him, and you can say hello? Just look him in the eye and pretend like I’m not here.”<\/p>\n
He giggled again.<\/p>\n
My oldest son appeared through the crowd, a paper plate of meatballs in his hand. “What are you doing?”<\/p>\n
I nodded over my shoulder. “Are we taller?”<\/p>\n
He didn’t even crack a smile, just considered. “Not quite,” he said. “Want me to get on?”<\/p>\n
It was tempting, but we decided against it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What happens when the dad is the one whose social skills are not sufficient to the moment? Silliness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-G9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613","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=2613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}