According to Hofmann: Shopping with my kid: The hero’s journey: Part two
When we last left Mark Hofmann, he was comparing Joseph Cambell’s breakdown of The Hero’s Journey, the 12 steps that almost every hero’s story takes in fiction, to his experience with taking his 8-year-old stepdaughter, Emma, shopping with a gift card she had received for her birthday.
Previously, our dashing, intelligent and worldly cultured hero completed the first six steps from living in his ordinary world to the call to adventure and to crossing the threshold to a toy store where Emma rushes aisle to aisle, grabbing toys only to abandon them for others with the process repeating itself.
Now, our brave and fetching hero must continue his journey and onto the next step …
Step #7 Approach To The Inmost Cave: The inmost cave represents a terrible danger or an inner conflict; and Step #8 Ordeal: A dangerous test or a deep inner crisis that the hero must face in order to survive.
I have feared and loathed math since I was in high school and one of my teachers, after seeing my struggle with an abacus, allowed me to sit at my desk to read Stephen King novels and pass with a C-. It was that or tolerate me giggling and saying “bra” out loud whenever hearing the word “algebra.”
As an adult in a toy store, I was face to face with this math problem: Emma has a $50 gift card, she’s carrying an assortment of toys that have been and will be switched out for others, the shopping cart leaves the station at 8:45 a.m. and, finally, every item in the store is part of the going-out-of-business sale as sections of toys are discounted anywhere from 10 percent to 36.2 percent.
Near the end, Emma is holding a Disney DVD movie, a slime-making kit, four dolls and a pack of batteries, and she’s asking me how much is left on the gift card.
After an hour of continuous addition, multiplication of percentages, subtraction, square roots of prime numbers and lunar gravitation, only one answer came out of my mushy brain.
“You’re breaking even!” I said, fully knowing and not caring that my math was way off to the point where she would have enough money left over on the gift card to buy another slime doll DVD or I would have to sell a kidney to pay the difference.
She was happy, she had a lot of stuff, and we were heading to the checkout. I considered it just a draw until …
Step #9 Reward: After overcoming his greatest personal challenge, the hero emerges from battle and often with a prize.
My prize? Ten cents. Of course, I didn’t get 10 cents back from the cashier, but we owed 10 cents, which was a victory.
As much as I hate shopping, I really hate wasting money and the idea of having some money left in limbo on the gift card would have caused an uprising of OCD in me that would make Howard Hughes sob.
Losing a dime turned out to be the best reward a guy could get to end this hero’s journey; however, according to the steps, the journey wasn’t over.
So, from this point on, I have to do what people who write lies for a living say they do and apply what they call “poetic license to drive” to this column.
Step #10 The Road Back: The hero must return home with his reward along with some acclaim.
Well, I wasn’t exactly home, but after the ticker-tape parade in my honor brought us from the toy store to The Olive Garden, I embraced the never-ending bread sticks and salad, and the waitress even gave me a complimentary half sip of table wine as we sat down!
Being a hero has its perks.
Step #11 Resurrection: This is the climax in which the hero must have his final and most dangerous encounter to ultimately succeed.
We returned home as Emma had her bounty of gifts, Amber was balancing boxes of restaurant leftovers in her hands and I, stuffed to the gills with bread sticks and salad, waddled to the mailbox to see if the latest issue of “Dumpster Diving Quarterly” had arrived.
However, to my horror, underneath the residual checks from my days as an international male model, I found a pink envelope addressed to Emma; looking at the return address made me shudder as it was from a relative who’s notorious for giving Visa gift cards.
Panicked and unsure what to do, I watched Emma prancing along to the house with shopping bags in her hand and a smile on her face that couldn’t be erased if you tried … with a sandblaster.
Seeing that made me realize there was only one thing to do to make this hero’s journey worthwhile …
Step #12 Return With The Elixir: This is the final stage of the hero’s journey in which he returns home to his ordinary world a changed man with cause to celebrate.
Interpreting Step #12 rather literally, I pocketed the Visa gift card and used it to buy a case of beer, which I drank while watching Netflix as Emma let her slime-infested dolls roam the living room while watching the “Frozen” sing-along edition on DVD.
What can I say? I’m more of an anti-hero.
According to Hofmann is written by staff reporter Mark Hofmann of Belle Vernon. Watch Mark’s video series at heraldstandard.com and YouTube. Like and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.