Fried Chicken, Mashed Potatoes, Biscuits, and Applesauce

If I were I smoker, I imagine this would be akin to lighting up on the rooftop of a large warehouse overlooking the water, watching the sunrise twinkling off the drowsy towers of the city in the lull between a long night's work and Denny's for eggs and hash browns before bed.

This weekend was UrbanPromise's annual Messiah College trip for its third through fifth graders, and it was a weekend that was every bit as fulfilling as exhausting, as these trips tend to be.

We left the UP headquarters at around 11:00, half an hour late after one of the two Urban buses refused to be woken up on a dreary Saturday morning. Many failed jumps later, we were cruising down I-76 with seventy kids, thirty staff, and all their luggage packed into one bus, a minibus, two vans, and two personal vehicles. I was on one of the vans, along with the other interns deemed "too large" to squeeze onto the bus with the kids. Around 1:00, we stopped at a McDonald's which was lucky enough to be inundated by orders for seventy Happy Meals. The ten kids we brought, six boys and four girls, were understandably not very interested in waiting it out, so we crossed the street and ate at Wendy's instead. We made it to Hershey Park by 3:00 and charged exultantly into the twisted metal and whining roar of the roller coasters amidst a light drizzle that promised to get worse by the time we left.

I was a little less exultant than the rest about the roller coasters, but I was secretly thankful to save one of our boys, Richard, from the embarrassment of following the group around as the only kid afraid to do the rides. The two of us did one coaster but then split off from the group to play arcade games, ride the cable cars, drive the bumper cars, and take the monorail around the park. The monorail, as Richard put it, was like a roller coaster, only it didn't make you feel sick. By dinner time, the wind and the rain had picked up considerably, and we made our way back to the parking lot to eat bagged sandwiches that we had prepared the day before out of the back of one of the vans. Dinner was followed by a tour of the Hershey Park Chocolate World that took us through the birth of a chocolate bar in a faux-factory complete with singing cows. We exited through the ubiquitous museum gift shop, where our kids loaded up on candy from Hershey workers that were giving it out for Halloween. Then it was back to the park for more fun in the rain and dark, until 8:00 when we loaded up the bus for the trip to the hotel where we were staying.

After distributing the luggage, we were each assigned two to three kids and given a room. The schedule that night consisted of swimming in the hotel pool at 9:00, lights out at 11:00, and a snack delivered to the room sometime in the interim. The plan was to get the kids down to breakfast by 8:00 so we could load up and leave for Messiah College at 9:00 in the morning. I was assigned Richard, Michael, and Marc from our boys, and after heading up to the room to get changed, we ran down to be the first in the pool. It turned out that a lot of other kids had the same idea, and the hotel pool was not built to accommodate seventy odd people at once. Undaunted, our kids filled the hot tub and packed into the pool with giddy screams, promptly scaring away any other guests at the hotel hoping for an evening dip.

We made it back up to the room before 10:30 so that, as Michael suggested, we might have some time to "play" before lights out. I had made it clear that at 11:00 the lights were going out and we were going to lay in bed, and that at 12:00 the television was going off for good. With this in mind, my three boys set out to have the most desperately packed half an hour of fun possible. By the time eleven o'clock rolled around, we had played several rounds of hide and seek in the pitch dark, diligently jumped on the beds, thrown pillows at each other, ding-dong ditched the girls' room next door and prank called the guys' room on the other side, and heated up a pack of Famous Amos cookies in the microwave. The snack cart was late and I let them stay up until it rolled around and left us buried in a healthy pile of chips, SlimJims, Gushers, and Capri Sun. Up until this point, I had been fairly bewildered by my kid's apparent inexhaustible store of energy. I had warned them that if they didn't go to sleep on time, they would be miserable trying to wake up the next morning at seven to be on time for breakfast. This, however, I figured would be the breaking point. I had both seen and experienced the effects of junk food on kids who hadn't just spent the day and better part of the night running around an amusement park, dunking each other in the pool, and having pillow fights. Michael told me that he hadn't even slept the night before we left in his excitement. It was inevitable. They would eat their chips and their candy and briefly go crazy on the mixture of sugar and chips and glee before crashing in a most devastating manner into respective comas that I would have to shake them out of the following morning for breakfast.

Over an hour later, I was still trying to calm them down enough to sleep. As requested, all three kids were lying in bed, and the television went off at 12:00. Marc was the first one to drift off, and, figuring that I wouldn't have to worry about him anymore until morning, I ignored his emphatic snores to concentrate on the other two. After polishing off his last SlimJim, Richard contentedly dropped out in the middle of a conversation with Michael about building his own roller coaster and where hamburgers came from. Triumphant at the sound of his even breathing and Michael's indignation at suddenly talking to himself, I bluntly denied Michael's request to turn the television back on and set out to talk him to sleep.

To my surprise, our conversation went from cows to the topic of death. After a moment's pause, Michael asked me whether I was aware that there was no place in the entire earth that was safe. Curious, I asked him, "Safe from what?"
"From dying," he replied. "I hate dying, and I don't even like to talk about it. I hate that people have to die. But I don't want to talk about it anyway," he concluded.
A moment later, he continued, "I just hate it when other people die. I wish there was no dying."
I told him that dying was a part of life, and that, all things considered, heaven didn't sound so bad.
"Still," he answered, "I wish when we were going to die, we would all just go back to being babies again, and start over, instead of dying."
He went on to tell me of a world where this held true, one where he could meet all his grandparents and great grandparents, and where people would stop needing to go to school unless they wanted to. Jobs, he reasoned, could be filled by kindergartners, unless of course they were too short.
"Matt," he asked, stopping abruptly, "are you asleep?"
"Getting there," I responded.
"Good," he said, and in the silence that followed, I knew Michael was finally asleep.

Weary but satisfied, I lay down on the floor and prepared to get what rest I could, setting my alarm for 6:30 so I could shower before setting about waking up my boys. Sleep came quickly, and I was grateful for it. It certainly didn't seem like much time had passed when I felt something and woke up to Marc poking me and asking whether it was 8:00 and time to go down for breakfast yet. As it turns out, this was because much time hadn't passed; it was barely past three, and, as I pointed out, very much still dark outside. I wasn't sure whether I was more shocked at being woken up or at finding him awake a mere three hours after I thought he had been dispatched by fatigue, and I told him to go back to sleep. He did so without arguing, but not before waking up Michael and Richard to let them know that it was only three and still dark outside.

The rest of the night I spent praying whenever one of the boys stirred that he wouldn't wake up, and a few more disturbances aside, we made it through the night, unaided by the fact that, with the clocks changing that night, it was one hour longer than usual. To my amazement, they all woke up on their own before seven, filled with boundless energy and excitement for the day at Messiah College.