8/10 I should write down this thing from Cedar Point. The children wanted to know if I still remembered how, when we were at Disney World – then still with their mother, a few months before our breakup –, I had forgotten where I had parked the car and we had to search for it all over the place. Quite stunning how the children still remember that, it must have been a formative moment. 

I told them that in this family, our new family, when someone makes a mistake, we don’t spend time pointing out that mistake. Everybody gets something wrong sometimes. In our family, rather than assigning blame, or making fun, everybody steps in to have each other’s back.

And so at Cedar Point, we used five or six lockers in various parts of the park over the course of the day. Enter your secret code – I always use the same four digits –, the system assigns you a locker, you put your stuff in and remember the number of that locker. It had worked great, we had become good, even routine at it. For the last locker of the day, as we left it with our stuff inside, I realized, and remembered, that its number was just a permutation of my secret code, so that was an easy one.

We did our last rides, it had already gotten dark, and the park was about to close. We got back to the lockers, and I remembered our number was just a permutation of my secret code. But it didn’t work. Tried it again, didn’t work. Well okay, so the locker’s number must be a different permutation of my secret code. Swap around the digits, try this other locker. But that one didn’t work either. 

In quick succession I got embarrassed, then panicked. I tried to hide my panic from the kids, but they quickly realized what had happened. I gave them my secret code, and we ended up trying all the lockers in the cabinet, one by one, up and down, over and over. None of them worked.

The thing of beauty which then happened was that my son used his Garmin watch – which I had handed down to him a year earlier – to locate his phone which was in the locker. The watch would light up in a circle of indicators, red if the phone was far away, orange, yellow, green as he got closer. I had no idea this function even existed. I tried it on my watch too, and yes indeed, still in panic, we got closer and closer to the area where our phones had to be.

And it was my daughter who finally shouted: “I’ve got it!” I looked at the locker’s number, and yes, indeed, it was a permutation of the digits of my secret code. I just hadn’t thought of that variant.