“I’m sooooo excited!” Colin said from the back seat of the ute.
Janine and I smiled. Colin had been looking forward to this night for several days. The school was having their annual drive-in movie fund-raiser. It was a movie we’d seen before — The Chronicles of Narnia — but that didn’t stop Colin and Andrew from being excited.
“When are we going to get to the school?” Colin asked a few second later.
“Colin, you go this way to school every day. How far do you think it is?” Janine asked, sounding a bit exasperated.
“Not far?” he replied.
“A few more minutes,” I said. “Just be patient.”
“But I can’t. I’m just sooooo excited!”
Everyone was relieved when we pulled into the school grounds. We were quickly directed to where they wanted us to park.
“Is it okay if we reverse in?” Janine asked.
“Sure, go ahead. Just line up with the other cars,” the parking attendant said.
This was our second school drive-in movie experience. We were doing the same as last year, but were a bit better prepared this time. In the back of the ute we had an air-mattress, doona, pillows and the boys’ sleeping bags. There were also a couple of chairs and an old horse rug for Janine and I. I would’ve preferred a blanket to keep us warm, but we didn’t have a spare blanket, and we did have a spare horse rug — you can tell what the priorities are like in our family.
After parking the car, everyone got out and we headed to the small fair that was set up nearby. It was still at least an hour until the movie started, possibly longer. With the end of daylight saving, it would get dark quicker than it did last year, but I overheard someone saying they still didn’t expect the film to start until after 8:30pm.
Apart from a few commercial entertainments, most of the fair was run on a volunteer basis by school parents. This was most obvious at the coffee stand. I had foolishly offered to buy a cappuccino for Janine.
“The machine isn’t working. It says the dregs drawer need to be cleaned out, but it’s empty!”
Being the sticky-nosed person that I am, I couldn’t help walking around to see if I could help.
“Let me have a look at that tray,” I said.
They handed it to me, and I looked over it carefully.
“There are no sensors that I can see. Are you sure this is the dregs drawer?”
They shrugged. “We’re just parents trying to help out. We’ve got no idea.”
After a few minutes of embarrassing failure, someone came up and told us the manual was in the box. It was quickly located and I claimed it so I could try to work out what was going on. As an experienced IT professional, I understood the acronym, RTFM, which stands for “Read the manual”. The person who told me that sniggered when I asked him what the F stood for, but he wouldn’t tell me.
It was only another minute before I had the answer.
“That compartment on the side is the dregs drawer, and you need to take it out while the power is still on, and wait at least five seconds before you put it back in.”
It was so obvious in hindsight. After all, who cleans machines with the power off nowadays? They’d been turning the power off whenever they pulled things apart, and that’d been their mistake.
I eventually returned to Janine with her coffee. As a treat to myself, I’d bought one for myself, too.
“Where are the boys?” I asked.
“They wanted to play in the playground, so I said they could,” she replied, smiling with relief when I presented her drink to her.
We were sitting there, enjoying the peace-and-quiet of a school yard full of kids and parents, when the serenity was shattered. Colin was approaching, crying. I stood up and intercepted him.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, with the incredible idiocy reserved for parents in a stress environment. He wouldn’t be crying if he wasn’t hurt.
Not surprisingly, he nodded his head. Janine had joined me by this stage.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I was going along the monkey bars, and I got to the big steps, and I got onto the first one okay, and then stepped to the second one, but when I tried to go from the second to third, I slipped and fell through and hit my face.”
When something goes wrong, Colin is not given to simple explanations, like “I fell”. He prefers the blow-by-blow description of what precisely happened, even if the explanation makes no sense. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I got the general idea: he fell.
It turned out he’d cut his lip. Janine went and got some ice and we managed to get him calmed down. We decided it might be a good idea to retreat to the ute and start getting everything set up for the movie.
It didn’t take long. Colin had received both a wind-up torch and a radio for his birthday. This meant we had light when we needed it (without having to worry about batteries running out) and we could use the radio to listen to the movie. The automotive engineers who’d designed our ute had clearly never anticipated the need to listen to the radio from the back, and had neglected to include speakers. Last year we’d wound the windows down and had the radio turned up loud, so we could hear it, but the sound quality hadn’t been good.
Our position wasn’t too bad. We were four rows back from the front, and slightly to one side. The boys in the back of the ute had an unobstructed view of the screen, while the car in front of us obscured the bottom edge for Janine and I when we sat in the seats we’d brought with us.
It was with delight that that car left shortly before the movie started. I suspected they’d only been there for the fair. This meant we were all in an ideal position to watch the film.
The boys were in the back, snuggled up under the doona with the canopy helping to keep in the heat, while Janine and I sat huddled under the horse rug. The wind was cold — it was almost mid autumn, after all — but the canvas rug kept most of the wind at bay.
The movie was about to start when a young man in a thin, short-sleeved shirt came up to us. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans and his arms were held tight against his body, trying vainly to keep himself warm.
“Excuse me, but have you got a spare chair or picnic basket I could borrow?”
“Not really,” I said. “The only chairs we’ve got are the ones we’re sitting on. Why?”
“I just need something to reserve our space. I’ve got the silver Barina over there, and I need to drive off for a bit. We’ll only be gone for about fifteen minutes or so.”
I made a quick decision. There were two possibilities that I could see. While it was possible that someone who wore such inappropriate clothing on a cold night — I was personally wearing a T-shirt, jumper and ski-jacket — might be stupid enough to think stealing a cheap seat a worthwhile exercise, I thought it was more likely that he was a senior student of the school and just wanted to go get some more appropriate clothing to wear.
“Here, take this chair. I can stand until you bring it back.”
Despite the darkness, his sense of relief came across clearly.
“Thanks, mate!”
It was a few minutes later that disaster struck. In the drive-in equivalent of the large person sitting down in front of you at the cinema, a large van came along and carefully parked in the vacant spot in front of us, completely blocking our view of the screen. The boys still had a reasonable view, though not as good as it used to be, but Janine and I had to move.
I walked around and found a spot next to our car where we’d be able to see the screen between the vehicles in front of us. Janine checked to make sure we wouldn’t block the view of the people behind us, but we had to move all of our gear. We’d just finished, when the movie started.
“Are you okay there?” Janine asked me.
“Sure. It’s not a problem. That guy should be back soon,” I replied. Standing next to the back of the ute wasn’t a hassle. If I really needed to, I could climb in the back with the boys.
It turned out that I was partially wrong with my guesses earlier. The young man came back with the chair about ten minutes into the film, still in his totally inappropriate clothing. I hoped he had good heating in his car, or someone warm to snuggle up to, because otherwise he’d freeze.
I put the chair down behind Janine — the only place where I’d be able to see the screen — and snuggled up under an old rug to watch the film.
“Daddy,” Colin called out. “What are those planes doing?”
“Daddy, what are those people doing?”
“Daddy, why are they doing that?”
“What’s going on Daddy?”
“Why are they running, Daddy?”
“Is she a bad person, Daddy? Why is she a bad person, Daddy?”
A typical night at the movies.