Marshmallow Goo

I used to think that real fun meant staying home on Sundays and watching football games.
But there are times when we must abandon our instinctive ways and experience a broader taste of life and re-establish what it means to be Dad and do things with our families - even if it means sacrificing the 2nd half of a good football game. So, my son’s scout pack, thinking they are bigger and better than the Denver Broncos, took us away from our homes this one Sunday afternoon and led us to a place called Cowboy Meadows for dinner and a hayride. I wasn’t entirely unfortunate we got lost along the way as I was able to capture a good 7 minutes of the 3rd quarter on the radio before we arrived at our destination in the lovely countryside of Louisville, Colorado. Nestled among sprawling horse-property, Cowboy Meadows was pretty much nothing disguised as something that someone might mistake for a real Cowboy Ranch.

Sometimes during these events you’re having so much fun, you wish you could have recorded it all and played it back when you got home. This was not one of those times. There are other times when you’re having such fun that you’re glad you forgot the camera. The good news is that we really DID forget the camera. The bad news is that we really didn’t have that much fun because there was not much to do. We could have used the camera.

For starters, we decided we should eat first and take the hayride, second. So, we dined on plump Hebrew-brand hotdogs which were generously marinated in boiling water and served over a tasty, Costco-bought bun. Served with Kraft Relish and French’s mustard, they were nothing short of gourmet. I helped myself to two of them and might have made my way for thirds had my stomach not reminded me how one time I got sick on a 3rd hotdog when I was a scout-aged boy myself. After all these years, I learned. These events are a wonderful reminder of our past childhoods.

The hayride turned out being much better than I had imagined. Though the camera was forgotten, the transistor radio was not. I listened to the remainder of the Broncos game on my pocket radio with the sound turned down real quiet and was able to inconspicuously ignore everyone for the completion of the entire game. It was truly a magical event and the Broncos won. The unfortunate thing was that the hayride was only half over upon completion of the game. Without a game to watch, I noticed we were moving about as fast as a turtle with two broken legs and had only completed half the loop around the ranch. Our driver (old Texan-looking guy with cowboy hat), sensed nobody was having much fun and thought he would make up for it by taking us for a second lap.

After the dinner and hayride, the event picked up pace as these obnoxious and rowdy boys (clean-cut, American scouts fresh with mustard and ketchup still running down their chins), aged 6-10, stampeded towards a hot, open fire, armed with 18-inch long skewers, hoping to murder a few marshmallows, provided they could avoid goring each other to death along the way. Fortunately, the parents being older, wiser and more mature were smart enough to get the heck out of their way.

Most of the boys, as far as I could tell, made it to the fire with both of their eyes still in place.
For a while it looked like a Sumo wrestling event as the boys pushed and shoved for supremacy around the open fire. After threatening to position one another into the hot, glowing flames, they quite aggressively stabbed these white, fluffy cylinders into the center of the deadly fire and watched in naive wonderment at how something so soft and white could violently transform itself into a carcinogen-enriched ball of black, smoking goo. Watching so many boys stuff their chubby cheeks full of gooey-black soot gave me a new appreciation for candy bars and other desserts that we don’t have to burn-beyond-recognition to enjoy.

It was an evening I won’t soon forget as a souvenir found itself attached to me when I got home. One of those cancerous forms of marshmallow that didn’t quite make into a scout’s grimy mouth, found its home on the bottom of my shoe. The goo of Sunday Night is still with my shoe today. Among our home’s many arsenal of chemical cleaners, we have tar remover, paint remover, goo-remover, and on and on, but no marshmallow goo remover. I am convinced that there is NOTHING in anyone’s garage strong enough to remove marshmallow goo. If a company comes up with a successful solvent formula and names it, ‘Marshmallow Remover, they will have no peers.

I did learn something even better. That goo sticks to much more than your shoe. Marshmallow goo is in fact, the very fabric that bonds our American families. It is the glue that forces us to do things that we’d probably rather not do. Marshmallow Goo is what keeps families so close and makes Dads miss football games. As long as there is marshmallow glue, NOTHING can get between our families. Marshmallow goo is nothing to mess with.