Saturday, May 9, the day before Mother’s Day. Here are Jennifer and Gabe preparing the soil and planting the seeds. Each of us has our various jobs: Jennifer and I shovel dirt and mix in chicken manure to improve the soil in the bed, Hank stays inside the house working on his Alaska state project for school, and Gabe occasionally wields the shovel but mainly collects bugs that he finds in the dirt.

Lured by the prospect of seeing something gross, Hank comes outside to see Gabe’s bag of bugs. “Dude,” he says, “that’s awesome.” “Do you want to feel them?” Gabe asks. “No,” says Hank. I confess during the shoveling that in all my life I have never planted anything before-not one fruit, not one vegetable, and certainly not any sunflowers. “That’s amazing,” says Jennifer. “I’m so happy to be part of your first experience.” Hank adds, “I’ve never planted seeds in chicken dung before.”

Thursday, May 14. Gabe and I water the sunflowers. Like the American economy, no green shoots are visible yet. Watering the sunflowers quickly turns into watering Gabe. He starts running around the lawn giggling and exulting as the spray from the hose soaks him like a spring shower.

Sunday, May 17. Success! Here, Hank explores the eight to twelve tiny shoots that are suddenly bursting from the chicken manure soil. This is a testament to the wisdom of The Dangerous Book for Boys, our guide for The Daring Quest, which recommended sunflowers because they grow very fast and children (and their parents) can see immediate results. Afterward Gabe and I go up to my office to download the pictures he has taken, and I teach him how to use the Kodak photo editing  software. He quickly catches on and crops the photos and saves them to the desktop without my help. “I can do it,” Gabe says. “I know you can,” says his father.

In a moment Hank follows us into my office and learns to use the photo editing tools too. The two of them take turns editing photos, and it occurs to me that while the boys are ostensibly growing sunflowers, they are also learning some of the skills I hold dear: writing, editing, photography, design, publishing.

Tuesday, May 19. Before the finals of “American Idol,” I water the sunflowers and the other plants in the beds, something I’m doing much more than I ever have in the past. I feel more connected to the sunflowers because I helped plant them and they’re part of The Daring Quest. This seems a good lesson for teaching children as well: A thing that is done for them will never matter as much to them as when they do it themselves.

Saturday, May 30. I am brushing my teeth when Gabe runs into the bathroom to tell me something. This is not unusual. It is almost impossible to take a shower without Gabe coming in to tell Jennifer or me-whoever is in the shower at the time-his latest breaking news about how he can’t find one of his Warhammer toys or how he had a dream last night about a peanut butter sandwich. But this is truly a dramatic development. “I have good news and bad news about the sunflowers,” he says. “The good news is they’re growing. The bad news is they’re being eaten. By snails, I think.”

Springing into action,  I go down to the garage, find a bag of snail-killing pellets, toss some handfuls in the dirt, and create a snail Maginot Line along the edges of the bed. Take that, you pesky varmints!

Wednesday, June 10. The sunflowers are growing, and growing. According to Gabe’s measurements, the tallest is more than twenty inches high, and there are a bunch of other plants that are nearly as tall.

Thursday, June 18. Gabe measures again and the tallest is now two feet high. Two feet! It’s a miracle!

What I am discovering, however, is that boys frequently do many rude and inappropriate things without ever having to be taught. For instance, wet towel snapping. The other day I was in the men’s locker room at the Benicia swimming pool and a group of boys were snapping wet towels at each other. A wet towel, unlike a dry one, can leave a quite a sting upon impact, and this is why, dating back to the beginning of time, boys have been engaging in wet towel fights in locker rooms. The greatest at this I ever saw was my boyhood friend Mark Croghan, who could snap a towel the way Indiana Jones uses a bull whip.

Do girls soak their towels or tee shirts in water, twirl them up like a rope, and then snap them at each other’s butt in their locker room? I do not know the answer to this, but my guess is…not. Nor can I imagine girls doing what I saw a bunch of boys do today at the pool. There were maybe six boys standing around, all in swimsuits, shirts off. One of the boys took his open palm and swung it as hard as he could against another boy’s back, hitting the skin so hard I could hear the pop several feet away. But the boy who was hit, instead of reacting with shock and anger as one might expect, was smiling.

See, he was in on it. It was probably his idea. And he looked proud as all the other boys crowded around him to see what kind of mark it had left on his back. It was bright red and seemed even larger than the hand of the boy who hit. Better still, it remained a conversation piece for quite a while as the boy walked around the pool showing it off to other friends. He could even make the mark get bigger or smaller by moving his shoulders back and forth.

How do boys get ideas to do hare-brained things like this? Got me. But if you ever did any stupid, idiotic pranks when you were a child, or had any done to you, drop us a line. We’re always interested in foolishness of all kinds.

Playing chess is one of the challenges in The Dangerous Book for Boys, and thus in the Dangerous Quest, and it was a snap to do because I’ve played chess with my daughter and sons for years. But what I found when I started playing on this movie-based novelty set is that I couldn’t tell which pieces were which, and so Hank, who just graduated from the fifth grade, beat the pants off me. Is this a queen? Wait, it’s a bishop? Oh geez, well then I’ll move my rook. That’s not a rook but the king? Oh come on!

Now here’s your chance to see if you can do better. Below are pictures of chess pieces from Lord of the Rings. Your job is to identify which ones they are-pawn, rook, queen or whatever. Gabe wielded the camera and I put my hand behind each piece because it cut down on the glare in the photo. In the first set of photos we deliberately did not shoot the insignia at the bottom of each piece because that gives away what it is. In the answers section we’ve shown the piece in full frame so you can see what it is.

Got it? Six dark pieces and four light. See if you’re smarter than a fifth grader chess player and tell what they are.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Answers are here.

2. Rook/Castle

3. Queen

4. Bishop

5. Knight

6. Pawn

7. Knight

8. King

9. Bishop

10. Pawn

The latest in my quest to do all the challenges in The Dangerous Book For Boys with my sons in a year…
The Dangerous Book for Boys, the sourcebook and inspiration for The Dangerous Quest, is not merely an activity book; it poses questions about the world, discusses geography and aspects of natural science, contains maps, diagrams and charts, tells the stories of epic world battles, shows pictures and provides information about pirates, the Navajo language, military codes, national flags, and other topics, and recommends poetry and literature for boys to read.

The thinking of authors Conn and Hal Iggulden is that boys should know about such things just as surely as they should know how to make a homemade battery or create invisible ink using urine. In “Sampling Shakespeare” (p. 150, DBFB), the Igguldens seek to introduce boys to Shakespeare, excerpting some of the Bard’s best lines from his plays. (In an unfortunate oversight, however, there are no excerpts from the sonnets.) But in skimming over these lines, I wondered if just having Hank and Gabe read lines from Lear or Romeo and Juliet would actually achieve the desired effect of making the words of the World’s Greatest Writer Ever come alive to them.

At dinner the other night I happened to mention Portia’s “Mercy” speech from “The Merchant of Venice,” fumbling to remember those beautiful and perfect sentiments. Whereupon my wife, a former Shakespearean actor who studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, rose from the table, stepped over to a bookshelf, and took up “The Comedies” from the National Shakespeare, an oversized cloth facsimile edition of the first folio of 1623 that she bought at a Sotheby’s auction when she was a student in London. Turning to the speech, she began to speak it trippingly on her tongue:

“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.
It is twice blessed.
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes
It is mightiest in the mightiest…”

Jennifer explained to the boys afterward that Shakespeare’s words were four hundred years old and that even though she had studied him at one time, she had to really concentrate on what he was saying in order to understand it. I added that we had seen a production of “Twelfth Night” last fall and that a lot of what the characters were saying had just gone past me; I didn’t get it.

The boys listened politely (unusual for them at dinner; normally they’re squawking at each other and interrupting constantly), but I think Portia’s words droppeth right past them and they didn’t get a bit of it. When they were gone I asked Jennifer how she thought we could establish a connection with the Bard, complicated as always by the fact that Hank is eleven and Gabe eight and naturally have different reading and comprehension levels. She said that when she was a girl her mother had offered her a bribe to memorize the great speech in “Richard II” about England: “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” (This passage is also quoted in DBFB).

“I did it,” Jennifer recalled. “I memorized the speech, and I wasn’t any older than Hank is now. It was hard though.”

So what about bribing the boys to memorize a passage from Shakespeare? Bribery is a time-honored parental method to motivate children. I talked to a Mom last night at the pool who confessed that she promised her son a cell phone if he performed well at a county swim meet. He excelled and got his wish.

Jennifer’s mother (see The True Story of the Girl Who Shot a Book to learn more about her) had given her a nickel to memorize Richard, but that hardly seems adequate given inflation and the exalted financial expectations of today’s youth. What about a sawbuck to learn Hamlet’s soliloquy? Or perhaps a five-spot for the Saint Crispin’s Day speech (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”) in “King Henry V”? Too much or not enough? What, a bribe isn’t the right way to handle this? I’ll keep mulling.

To be honest, I haven’t read any of Iggulden’s fiction yet (he has also written a quartet of historical novels on Julius Caesar), but I’ve certainly been inspired by his nonfiction. As the critic Charlotte Allen writes, “The Dangerous Book for Boys became a No. 1 bestseller in 2007 because it offered…a chance for boys to be boys. On its pages they could learn how to do things that boys like to do-grow crystals, build fires, make paper airplanes, design a working bow and arrow, learn about dinosaurs and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World-things designed to build their competence and self-confidence and help them grow into men.”

This is the goal of The Dangerous Quest as well, seeing if I can give my boys a little boost toward manhood and in the meantime have a little fun and bring other boys and men-and perhaps some girls and women-along for the ride too. Stick around, there’s more to come.

Today we are introducing a new feature: Boys Will Be Boys. It is separate from, but not unrelated to, The Dangerous Quest, my attempt to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in a year. It came about after I put out a call a couple of weeks ago for “inappropriate” childhood activities, and I was deluged with emails from men remembering all the hell-raising they did as boys.

We’ve already discussed 52-Card Pickup and Arm Farts, Pull My Finger, and Competitive Belching. In the weeks to come we will share more of these tender moments of boyhood, such as lighting farts, shooting rubber bands in class, chasing a babysitter with a dead mouse, setting off firecrackers, catapulting water balloons through open windows, and putting a shotgun shell on a fallen log, shooting it with a BB gun, and watching it explode.

Our initial offering is a childhood classic from Travis Roste of Minnesota: snipe hunting. Travis, the father of two daughters, grew up in a family of five boys and two girls. Above is a picture of three Roste boys: Travis and twin brother Trevor on the outside, and another brother Chad in the middle. When Travis and Trevor were young, their dad Myron took them into the woods to go snipe hunting. Here is how Travis remembers it:

“I grew up on a hobby farm, out in the country. It was a fantastic place to play and explore. I don’t have a lot of pictures when I was a kid, a couple of dozen, but hardly any of them show my dad. He wasn’t the kind of dad to pose for pictures. You had to kind of get him in a candid shot when he wasn’t looking.  He didn’t want his picture taken if he could help it. He was the old-fashioned type of dad. Didn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve. He showed us he loved us by taking us fishing and hunting and things like that. He’s 71 years old now and in great shape; he cuts wood and is active.

“My dad took me and Trevor snipe hunting in the woods not far away from our house. Here’s how you play: Go to a woodsy area when it is getting dark. Tell your boys to hold a burlap sack open to catch the snipe. You turn a flashlight on and put it in the bag, and tell them it will attract the snipe. Then tell them you are going to walk around in a big circle to drive the snipe toward them, but that they have to hold the bag perfectly still. Otherwise the snipe won’t come and they won’t catch any. To make sure they believe you, tell them that you did this as a kid.

“That’s exactly what my dad did told us, and Trevor and I went along with it all the way. We held the sack with the flashlight in it while my dad drove the snipe to us, as he said. We sat there for a long time while it was getting dark. Finally, when we didn’t see our dad anywhere, we went back up to the house, and there he was inside laughing at us. He told us that his dad had taken him snipe hunting too. We didn’t really get the joke too much back then, but of course we do now. It’s a grand tradition in the U.S. and we were glad to be part of it.”

Myron Roste and a friend.

Why this is I do not know, but it is. Not long ago I was walking my sons home from school and without thinking, I spit on the street. Hank and Gabe saw me do this and instantly tried to copy me. But anyone who believes that the ability to spit is somehow innate to the human condition would be sorely disappointed because both boys made weak attempts that barely cleared their chins.

Thereupon giving birth to a parenting dilemma: Do I leave my children in this ignorant state where they could be subject to ridicule on the playground by other boys who really know how to expectorate, or do I teach them the basics? Being the involved father I am, I chose the latter option, and the three of us stood on the sidewalk curb seeing how far we could launch saliva projectiles into the street.

A variation on a spitting contest is: Spitting Off a Bridge. On Memorial Day weekend Jennifer, the boys and I drove to Winters, a small Central Valley town where an old railroad bridge built in the early 1900s crosses Putah Creek, a lovely, meandering creek thickly bordered by  trees. The bridge runs maybe 100 feet above the water and when we were walking across, in another of those unthinking moments of which I am apparently very capable, I leaned over the rail and set free some of the excess moisture in my mouth, watching it drop into the creek. The boys of course gleefully did the same. Meantime  Jennifer diplomatically stepped away to let us have this poignant father-son bonding moment all to ourselves.

Hey, it could have been worse. We could have been standing on a balcony above a sidewalk with people walking by. But I’d never show my sons something like that. There is a proper time and place for expectoration and that is not it. And if they ever do something like that, they’re totally on their own.

This last fact-her brothers Chuckie and Alfie being gone-is perhaps the most pertinent because they would have never let their younger sister shoot their .22-caliber rifle had they known about it. It was their gun, and many a time Lillian Smith (her maiden name) had sat at the top of the basement stairs watching Chuckie, Alfie and Bruce, her oldest brother, fire away at a metal target. “I would sit at the top of the stairs desperately wanting to take part,” remembers Lillian, but her brothers never let her, although later on Alfie did relent and show her how to break down the gun, clean it and reassemble it. These skills came in handy when her older brothers went off to fight in the second world war and Lillian, shouldering her rifle, walked around the neighborhood with her mother making sure that all the homes had drawn their black-out shades down during air raid warnings. This was serious business for her, her way of helping in the national emergency, and although she did not really need to carry the gun her mother understood and let her do it.

The basement was perfect for target practice because its concrete walls were “like a fortress,” says Lillian. With her father sleeping upstairs, and her mother off visiting Aunt Suzy, and her brothers off somewhere, Lillian stole into the basement, uncovered the gun, and experienced the thrill not only of using a firearm for the first time, but of doing something that was forbidden to her. “The use of the book,” she explains, “was so that the noise of the impact would not wake up my father.” Her father worked nights at Allied Chemical and Dye and slept days, and he would not have liked it, not one bit, if she had woken him up. Nor would her brothers have liked it if they had found out what she was doing with their gun—”surely would have beat the hell out of me,” as she puts it—but she cleaned it afterward and picked all up the casings and none of them was ever the wiser.

The bullet passed through the cover between the words “Lives” and “Again,” and it’s fascinating to flip through the book and mark its progress: small and circular in the front but gradually widening out as if a person took his thumb and pushed down on the paper and indented it and made a hole in the exact same spot throughout the pages. The bullet eventually slowed and made less and less of an impression as it went along until on page 397, there is no more trace of it. What happened to the bullet fragment? Lillian may have thrown it away when she was hiding the evidence so her brothers would not discover her and punish her for her rebellion.

As interesting as it is to shoot a book, it is not the best part of the story, however. The best part was revealed when we saw Lillian, now in her seventies, at a Mother’s Day celebration when, as part of The Dangerous Quest, she showed her grandsons Hank and Gabe how to wrap a package in brown paper. The package she chose to wrap was none other than The Past Lives Again, and to learn how she did it, please read on.

Having rejected string as being unnecessary and perhaps a tad nostalgic—a trait, it is true, the authors Conn and Hal Iggulden sometimes fall prey to—Lillian set about to show the boys how to wrap a book using only ordinary paper, a brown paper grocery bag, a plastic bag, cardboard, scissors, and two-inch wide mailing tape that can be purchased at any office supply or mailing store. Here are the steps:

1) Fold a regular piece of 81/2×11 computer paper over the cover of the book to protect it. Books are hardy and resilient things but they are also fragile in their way and no one likes to receive a book in the mail that has been damaged.

2) Place the book with the paper around it inside a plastic bag. Push the book down to the bottom of the bag so there is no extra space, and wrap the plastic around the book tightly.

3) Place a piece of scrap cardboard on each side of the book, front and back-again, for protection. The cardboard should be about the size of the book.

4) Rip the handles off an ordinary brown paper grocery bag. Stick the plastic- and cardboard-wrapped book inside the bag horizontally. As before, all the way down to the bottom of the bag to remove any extra space.

5) Fold the paper bag over according to the size of the book. Then tape it lengthways and sideways with the mailing tape, making sure the package is tight. “Now it can be thrown against a machine at 70 miles per hour and it will not break,” Lillian told the boys. “And no machine can eat it up.” “What about a chain saw?” asked Gabe. “Well,” replied his grandmother, “a chain saw would eat it for sure. But I don’t think the Post Office has any chain saws.”

In Lillian’s practiced hands, the procedure took only a few minutes and her factory worker of a father, if he had been able to see her, would have marveled at her assembly line efficiency. The boys fumbled around a little at first but they picked up the techniques quickly and each wrapped a book. And as I was writing this up a week later, I was puzzling over my notes and unsure about some of Lillian’s instructions. So I called Hank up from downstairs, and he went through the steps and wrapped a book while I watched. He also quickly created a cool bookmark that Lillian showed us how to make, and I will share that in the next post.