We’d stopped at a candy “factory” next to the World’s Fair Park in Knoxville, and along with a few other candies, we bough dad some rum balls. At his request. He likes them.

After having to suffer through my driving of the ginormous Suburban on Cumberland Drive, on into a mini-parking lot at a Wendy’s which was crammed with people and screaming kids and, eventually, an obnoxious drunk man who was asked to leave by the staff, dad had had enough. Once back inside the vehicle, he asked for all of the rum balls, ate them, and his only comment was that “they didn’t have enough rum in them.”

We aren’t a family of drinkers.

That should tell you a lot.

Earlier we’d spend the morning hours crammed into the convention center with half of the world’s population of kids. It was wild, and what made it wilder was trying to find all seven third graders that my sister had on the team she led.

My older nephew, Cody, forms an integral chain of communication in which I text him, he responds, or gets on his walkie talkie and buzzes my sister. The texting is better, since the constant roar of activity and people make it all but impossible to hear the phone. While helping him take a few team members to the 3M booth for a challenge, I turned around and noticed one of the boys had walked off again.

Me: Where’s so-and-so?

Cody: (looking around and not seeing him, speaking deadpan) I don’t know, but he’s dead.

Cody went off and found the boy, who had been trading pins again. Pin trading is a strange and addictive behavior, I’ve found. People who are into it are obsessive about it, and it is something done far beyond just this event; adults and kids all over trade pins at events and on vacations (like Disneyworld, Dollywood, etc.). I get a kick out of watching Cody trade; he has some kind of radar which senses who has the coveted hard-to-get pin, and manages to convince them to trade for them. It’s a complex thing, trading for pins in a way that allows you to get the pins you want as well as pins you know you can trade up for later.

Once we had the kids back together, we rejoined the rest of the group. I have much video of the morning and the wall-to-wall kids that packed out the convention center. It’s crazy. Cody made a joke, during one of our many joking sessions, that the reason that the lanyards (that all participants and registered spectators were required to wear, with an event ID attached) had break-away clasps was because too many team managers had tried to kill themselves by the end of the week.

The team managers get run ragged.

It was a tremendously long day, and I could tell TOF were getting tired. After waiting for an hour for my sister’s team to come out and do a little Ta-Da performance following their instant challenge, I, too, was ready to call it a day. While standing around, waiting (for I am the videographer for the group), Cody and I joke around some more. I have such an infantile sense of humor. We were both dying of laughter multiple times, joking about stupid things like electrifying pins and using them as a kind of remote taser for kids that won’t listen, and other stuff. I’ve been drawing cartoons for each of the days, and we looked at them frequently for that painful kind of silent, repressed laughter when you know it’s inappropriate to laugh out loud.

After the event was over, TOF went to the car and I went with my sister, Cody, and three members of her team to the student union there on campus.

Whenever I’m on a college campus, I have an almost overwhelming urge to go back to school. There’s just something about that campus vibe…but then I remember the ten years of student loans that I paid off, and the feeling pretty much dissipates. I usually pick up as many free newspapers and pamphlets as I can and, inevitably, get turned off by the usual college-opinion drama that is, despite claims of being “alternative” and “independent”, identical to every other free paper I’ve ever picked up.

Anyway, we headed to the student union; my sister to get my two nephews some UT caps. My sister was fairly worn out. She told of another team manager who fell asleep in her chair in one of the rooms at the convention center with her team bouncing and screaming all around her. Very few of the adults here at the Destination Imagination Global Finals look “fresh”; the kids have successfully worn them down to one quivering nerve. On the walk down to the union, the two boys were all over the place, and the little girl went on and on about how tired she was and how her legs hurt from walking, and how she wished she had a horsey.

Before leaving the student union, all of us stopped and got an ice-cream treat in the food area. This presented its own challenges, one of which was the little girl getting upset about her ice-cream melting out in the hot sun as we walked back.

Little Girl: My ice-cream is melting.

Me: Melting is one of the properties of ice-cream.

Cody: Everything melts.

Little Girl: People don’t melt.

Me: Actually, people who look at the ark of the covenant while it’s open melt.

Little Girl: (staring at me, open-mouthed)

Janet: (turning back and giving me a stern stare)

Me: Ah…kidding.

She later decided, as I was about to part company with the little entourage and head back to the vehicle, that she wanted to throw the remains of her ice-cream cone away. I pointed to one of the many boxes all over campus for garbage, boxes that were labeled “reduce litter”, and suggested she toss it in there. The two boys careened on ahead up the sidewalk.

Little Girl: I can’t throw this there. This is garbage. It isn’t litter.

I think litter has become trash along the road side for this little girl. Litter isn’t a food product! It’s something else! It’s a subset of garbage!