Sometimes daddies are too far away

The season is winding down and so this week was the locally famous children’s singer’s last. The shows start at 8 PM, way too late normally, but I made a bedtime exception this week for Little Girl. The stage was a semi-circular platform underneath an ancient oak, and children sat cross-legged there with the parents on benches down a few stairs from the stage. Little Girl isn’t the type to separate from mommy easily, but she got into the music (when she wasn’t digging in the sand at my feet) and got up on stage (still facing me), pinwheeling her arms in her own self-taught dancing style, occasionally attempting splits and somersaults. (She later got several compliments on her moves.)

The singer has been working this gig for more than thirty years and it really showed. He was full of snarky comments about the posters the children had made, their endless delight in the ABC song, their regional accents. He made a lot of jokes about beatings and spankings. I’m not saying he wasn’t funny–to adults–or that the children didn’t enjoy the songs, but his attitude was weirdly off. It wasn’t really a patter that I’d want Little Girl much exposed to.

Or maybe the bad taste left in my mouth after the performance resulted from another Bad Tourist Parent episode. While most of the little kids dutifully sat and watched, another young girl, like mine, felt compelled to move to the music. She was pretty independent-minded and wandered the stage a bit in her pretty pink dress and pigtails (and occasionally the singer would show his irritation with her through some sarcastic remark about ADHD), and at one point moved towards the pretty blinking lights of his sound system. He turned and yelled, “Don’t you touch that!” and went back to his song.

This little girl reacted just like my own would when spoken to so sharply by a stranger and she froze, stuck out her lip, covered her face in her hands, and started sobbing. The crowd waited and soon started murmuring, “Where’s her mommy?” while looking around, watching for someone to come up and rescue her. No one came. I couldn’t take it anymore–it was heartbreaking, and it was just as if it were Little Girl were up there. I was close, so I popped up, lifted her, and brought her back to my bench on my lap where Little Girl waited.

“We’ll find your mommy, it’s okay,” I told her, as I continued to look around for the girl’s caregivers. Another lady beside me said she thought she’d seen the parents earlier in the evening and she looked about, too, but still no one was coming to fetch the scared toddler. The poor pigtailed thing started to ask for her mommy, and just when I was about to carry her to find a police officer, a pissed-looking guy came up, put his arms out for her, and said, “You didn’t have to go get her.” But I did. I couldn’t let that poor dear be scared and humiliated all alone on the stage when her parents obviously weren’t coming anytime soon. Where had he been, anyway? The bar?

So I’ll be glad when the tourist season is sewn up, though it’ll mean the end of The Perpetual Beach Vacation, and that, for company, we’ll be left just with the retirees. I overheard the dullest conversation between two of them today wherein the old guy detailed what yard work he had done that morning, in what way, with what equipment, for how long, and then moved on to what he would have done had the rain not started, and where he likes to buy his gardening supplies, and how he knows what to select, and how he decides to–OMIGOD I felt so sorry for his date, who sadly, and mutely, was probably just happy to have the attention of one of the few men available in her age bracket.

Speaking of men, Husband hasn’t even been gone half of the two weeks of this current trip, and Little Girl is already kind of a wreck about his absence. “I’m sad about my Daddy,” she tells me, and strangers (I can’t imagine what they make of that), often. “I want my Daddy come home.”