When Dad lost a Two Year Old
And we hope Mom never finds out
It is the fourth day of family vacation in Portugal, 2019. This is our first family vacation since Audrey, Garrett and I were in high school and we had forgotten what it was like to travel with our parents.
Mom believes in early starts. So what if Portuguese culture dictates that nothing opens before 10:00 A.M? Mom will be walking up and down the quiet tiled streets of Lisbon seeking the first pastry she can find. She is early to rise, first in line, misses out on nothing and takes photos of everything.
Much to Mom’s chagrin, it is only 2:00 P.M. when today’s early-morning start catches up with us. Audrey, Garrett and I completely poop out and return to the apartment for a siesta.
It is now dinner time. Mom tells us “Get up!” then puts on her tan bucket hat and loops her black cross body purse over her shoulders. She is ready to go. Arms loosely folded, she scrolls through her list of recommended restaurants on her phone while she waits impatiently by the front door for the rest of us to get on her schedule.
Instead, Dad calmly begins his underwear washing routine. A cool ten minutes later, Dad’s washable underwear is hanging off the front door handle to dry. No one can leave the apartment without coming face to face with a pair of sensible dark gray men’s underwear.
This is the man who stood in line at the biggest tourist trap Porto had to offer at the height of tourist season during peak visiting hours while the rest of the family rushed about, intent on soaking up as much of Portugal as possible. He cannot be hurried.
Mom, Dad, Audrey, and I finally make it to Time Out Market for dinner. Garrett opts to siesta in the Airbnb instead, leaving his dinner decision to Mom. The Time Out Market presents the best of the city’s food and restaurants in one central location. Filled with long wooden tables and stools, it resembles a high-end food court.
Tourists cram together and squeeze past one another in attempts to find the best octopus and aperitif pairing. Despite her own growling stomach, Mom is primarily concerned with finding food Garrett would like to eat. She puts her hat down, pulls four stools together and establishes a table for for us.
The three of us sit down in tired but companionable silence. Each of us stare in a different direction, attracted to different food stalls. Dad eyes the sushi. We’ve been telling him all week that sushi is not a thing to eat in Portugal. The existence of a sushi stall in the Time Out Market proves the family wrong. Dad revels in the triumph of being right. Now all that is left to do is pick an entree.
After a while, Audrey and I look up from our food reveries and realize Mom wandered off to find food twenty minutes ago.
“Where is Mom?” I ask. Audrey shrugs. What is taking so long? Craning our necks above the bustling crowd, neither of us see her. We scan the large venue with a bit more urgency as we’re growing hungry.
Dad interrupts our search to state blandly “This reminds me of the time I lost Audrey at Great America.”
He says this in the same way a person would say “I once lost my sock.” Audrey and I turn back to Dad in shock.
“You were about four,” He nods at me. “And Audrey must have been really little, maybe two. You had to go to the bathroom. But we had just gotten our food and I couldn’t take that with us to the bathroom. So I told Audrey to stay with the food.”
We see where this story is headed. We know most parents these days would never leave their two year old to watch the food at Great America. Most parents twenty years ago wouldn’t have done it either. But Dad has never been well calibrated on what is or isn’t the “thing to do”. After all, he will wash his underwear and put it on the front door handle to dry.
Audrey eyes Dad with dawning comprehension, “Mom doesn’t know about this, does she?”
“Oh, of course not!” Dad confirms our suspicions. Audrey and I grin at each other knowingly. If Mom had known about this incident, we would have heard of it by now. She would have brought it up every time Dad forgot to do something.
But in twenty years, we have never heard this story. We didn’t even know Dad had taken us there when we were so young. He continues, “When we got back from the bathroom, the food was there but Audrey was gone. Scariest moment of my life. She had just wandered off a bit. I found her.”
Audrey, sitting at the table in excellent health, laughs at the story of her misadventure of 1996. Mom finally returns laden with three containers of meat for Garrett. Audrey and I straighten our faces. We are still in shock. But we both know that it goes without saying, what Dad tells us in Lisbon, stays in Lisbon.
