The fact is, I’m a competent adult.  I am.  I know I’ve written about the time I accidentally wore orange pantyhose on TV while simultaneously strangling my organs with two pairs of Spanx, and about the two different times I accidentally left raw chicken in my car, and about the time I accidentally hit our garage door, and about the time I accidentally forgot to wear a bathing suit and had to pee off the side of a boat with my clothes on – but seriously, the rest of the time I’m a functioning human.  Fer real.  FOR REAL.  I mean, I may have just made two different wrong turns driving from Bay Lake to Grand Forks using two different GPSes on a route I’ve taken many years in a row in order to get home and type the words you now see on the screen, but the bottom line is I did get home.

I’m telling you this because the story I’m about to tell you may make you question my abilities, but I want you to know straight-off that your concern is misplaced because I did, in fact, do it.  And by it, I mean I successfully drove a pontoon with a tube on the back.

This past week was the Silverman Family Annual Lake Vacation.  My sister, Erica, and her husband, Hartley, and their sons, Nine and Five, flew in from Asheville, North Carolina, my parents drove in from Eden Prairie, Minnesota with Eleven (who had spent the previous two weeks with them for Camp Bubbe & Zayde), and I hopped over from Grand Forks.  Kyle and Fifteen came for a day at the tail end of the trip due to hockey.  To summarize, here were the adults participating in the vast majority of the vacation: Hartley (brother-in-law), Erica (sister), Amanda (me), Bubbe (my mom), and Zayde (my dad).  And here were the children: Eleven, Nine, and Five.  Also, since I feel like you may still be skeptical about my aforementioned competencies, I got to the lake all by myself without incident.  Brava, me.

On the second day at the lake, we took the children to the High Wheel Confectionery in Ironton, Minnesota, where we stuffed them full of candy and ice cream and then put them back in the car.  The sugar rush hit as we were pulling up to the cabin.

“We should do something with these children,” Erica said as they bounced off the walls.

“Let’s take them tubing,” I said, referring to the act of riding on a rubber tube being dragged by a watercraft.  In our case, our watercraft was a pontoon rented annually by Hartley and driven by either Hartley or Kyle – who, as I noted prior, was not present at this part of the vacation.

It turned out Hartley wasn’t there, either, having used the candy store adventure to have an adventure of his own on his stand-up paddleboard.

“We should wait for Hartley,” my mother said, knowingly.

“You don’t need to wait, girls,” our dad said, confidently.  “You can do it.  You can do anything.”

“Yes, we can, Dad,” Erica and I agreed.

Since we could do anything, the anything I decided to do was blow up the tube.  I had to blow up the tube because my husband, who is married to me and knows me much better than this but must have figured Hartley would do it, sent me to the lake with a deflated tube and an electric air pump.  I dragged the deflated tube and the pump to the backyard.

“We should wait for my dad,” Nine said, knowingly.

“We don’t need to wait,” I said, “because your auntie is a genius.  And I’ll show you how much of a genius I am as soon as I find an electrical outlet.”

Eleven found an outlet and plugged in the pump.  Nine helped me spread out the tube and locate the air nozzle or whatever it’s called, which was a huge plug hole in the side of the tube.  I flipped open the cover of the air nozzle and turned on the pump.  The tube inflated.  When the tube was full, I turned off the pump.  The tube immediately deflated.

“Uh oh,” Eleven said.

“Not uh oh,” I said.  “I’ve got this.”

I refilled the tube, quickly plugged the air nozzle, and stepped back.  The tube deflated.  I repeated the actions, replugging the air nozzle even more quickly this time, and stepped back.  The tube remained tubed.

“See,” I said.  The boys were not impressed enough.

While we were blowing up the tube, Erica had located the boat key, packed up a beach bag with snacks and towels, corralled our parents and Five into the boat, watched me trying to stop air from escaping a giant hole in the side of a rubber tube, and texted her husband.

“We’d like to take the pontoon out.  Can you come back?  If not I think we could prob figure it out?”

Here is that text:

Hartley had not responded by the time Eleven, Nine, and I carried the tube down to the boat, nor had he responded after I tried to tie the rope to the tube, or after Erica tried to tie the rope to the tube, or after Erica and I figured out how to tie the rope onto the tube because there really weren’t any other ways to tie it once we had exhausted the other options.  He also hadn’t responded after Erica and my mom tied, and then untied, and then re-tied the tube to the boat, and then tested their tying by tugging on it because none of us were sure how to test it otherwise.

He did, however, call Erica after that.

“Hartley said he will take the boys tubing if we pick him up,” Erica said.  “He’s right there.”

She pointed way out to the distance where a teeny-tiny figure was paddling towards us.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” our mom said.

“Okay,” our dad, who had both a bad knee and utmost faith in his daughters and had sat on the pontoon and applauded our good work during all of this, said.

Nothing happened for a few moments.

“I’ll drive,” I said.

“Okay,” Erica said.

“Okay,” our mom said.

“Okay,” our dad said.

I sat in the captain’s chair.

“Do you know how to turn it on?”  Erica said.

“Probably,” I said.  I lifted a cover and pressed a button that said ‘Power’ or something.  Nothing happened.

“You have to turn the key,” Nine said.

“Yes,” I said.  

Erica handed me the key.  I went to put the key into the ignition near the steering wheel, but it turned out there wasn’t an ignition near the steering wheel.  There wasn’t an ignition anywhere, in fact.

“Are you looking for the place for the key?”  Eleven said after a long time.  “Because it’s right here.”  He pointed to the ignition, which was inexplicably down by my knee.

“No, I knew where that was,” I said.  “I was looking for something else.”

I put the key in and turned it.  The engine started up.

“We did it,” I said to Erica.

“Hooray,” she said.  “But now we have to back up.”

I surveyed the dashboard.

“Get out and push us out of here,” I told her.

“Don’t know you know how to back up?”  Nine said, incredulously.  “You just press that button and pull back on the shifter.”

“No, I knew that,” I said.  “I wanted to save on gas.”

I did what he said.  The boat went roaring backwards.  Fortunately, everyone but Erica and Nine were sitting down – and by the time I recovered the speed, Erica and Nine were also sitting, albeit on the floor.

“That’s why your mom told you to sit tight,” I said to Nine as he picked himself up and deposited himself on the bench next to Eleven.

We backed up out of the dock area.  I put it in drive(? forward?)  and we began moving in the direction of Hartley.  The speedometer read five miles per hour.

”You can go faster, Mom,” Eleven told me.

“No, this is as fast as it goes,” I said.

We put-putted to Hartley.  I was going so slowly that we didn’t even have to stop for him to get on.

“Would you like me to take it from here?”  Hartley asked once aloft.

“Sure,” I said.

“You have earned a drink tonight,” my mother said as Erica and I took our normal spots as far away from the driver’s seat as possible.

“We earned a Xanax right now,” I said, fanning myself with the corner of the tube.

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The photo above is of my sister and me doing as God intended, which is sit on the pontoon and look at the water and not do any work.

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I was not on North Dakota Today this week because I was at the late. Last week, we talked about Joann Jesser, my Nice Person of the Week, as well as a long-distance runner named Theresa taking Lincoln by storm – I mean, foot. (Valley News Live)

Here’s the first few lines of my column in the Grand Forks Herald this week:

At least a dozen times a year, longtime readers of the Grand Forks Herald will come up to me and ask,

“Are you Big or Little?”

I am not the first member of my family to write a regular column for the Grand Forks Herald; I am the second. My mother, Robin Silverman, shared her own stories with the region starting in January of 1986. Many of those columns featured my younger sister and me, affectionately named “Little” and “Big,” respectively. My mom clicked her last clack of the typewriter on her column in 1994 when I, the Big — by then 14 years old and 4 inches shorter than Little — deemed her stories “too embarrassing for words.” Fast-forward 32 years and hundreds of my own authored stories about my ridiculous self and it turns out there were plenty of words left. Sorry, Mom.

Speaking of sorry, I didn’t have time to do any nice news this week. I’ll make it doubly good next week.

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