Chocolate Cocoa Puffs

The Boy Scout camp, where we stayed, my father and I, with other graduating Cub Scouts and their fathers, was deep in the woods but just a short way from Hempstead Turnpike some 15 miles from home, the long strip of metal and glass, car dealers and diners and electronics mom-and-pops and an amusement park called Jolly Roger, a road barren of homes and grass and sidewalks, but the woods were deep and claustrophobic. It rained at night ticking on the tent top and soaking the ground beneath our cots. We had managed a fire in a barbeque pit, or rather my father did. He managed a lot for me when I was disinclined to manage for myself, or was in a mood, or was unable to express my anxiety, but I don’t remember feeling safe nevertheless or comforted by the struggles of other tented fathers and sons barely visible in the woods around us. Lying in our cots we didn’t speak, my father smoked a Camel and doused it in the mud beneath his cot and perhaps he slept for a while, and perhaps I did and perhaps I cried or wondered where I could go in the dark and breathe and run and I groped around in my pajamas in the rain in the dark, looking for the mess hall to go pee. In the morning we broke down the tent, or rather my father did, and we went to breakfast in the nearby hall from which I had retraced my steps the night before and gotten lost along the wet ground and among the tents of other fathers and sons, now missing our tent as almost a home, missing my father's silence. My father ate a big breakfast and went out to smoke in a misty morning while I opened a small box of Chocolate Cocoa Puffs and smelled its contents and poured them into a cereal bowl with milk and tasted them, the sense of them mixed with the spin of the passing Hempstead Turnpike cars from the height of the roller coaster at the Jolly Roger, the heavy haze of Camel smoke in the car ride home, my rank wet clothes, my usual summer headache in my temples, down my throat, I remember clearly as if it were now, but clearest is the memory of the smell and taste of  wet Cocoa Puffs against my dry tongue and around my teeth just this moment closing around me.