The summer company picnic. Visions of office workers and their shy spouses playing frisbee, eating lukewarm spareribs, searching vainly for beer in the soda coolers. Spouses quietly scolding children, lest they misbehave and cause embarassment in front of the boss. A strained affair at best, at worst, marital arguments over trivial things.

He sat at a rough cut picnic table, a moment of peace while his wife took the children for a rest break. Such a funny place, he thought, and here I am one more stereotype in the crowd. You see all these people day in and day out, fully dressed, and it never crosses your mind at all to see them in half shirts, shorts out of fashion showing pale legs, and often mismatched spouses, speaking of trivialties and childrens antics.

A group of children swing fleetingly at a pinata swung by an aging, faded clown. A group of middle aged men, all surprisingly alike in the required casual uniform of khaki shorts and polo shirts watch with detached parental amusement through the tiny viewfinders of their camcorders. Do they ever watch anything as it happens, or just as they dub it onto tapes sent off to relatives they know nor care about? The ones who have no camera to their eye all stand, forced maleness as they stand, each with a soft drink de riguer in their right hand, middle aged stomachs protruding from too-tight shirts of styles long past.

Am I destined to become like this he wondered? Am I already? Or is this what fatherhood is about? You could go to any number of company functions around the country at any given summer moment, and see the exact same thing. What stereotype do I fit into? Not the cam-corder suburbanite. Not the avant-garde artisic boyfriend type. Not the joe-friendly type. Am I the one who sits just on the sidelines, wishing I was somewhere else-type?

He wondered this, and knew of the answer, even before his question was fully formed. Idly, he wondered what was missing at the picnic, and more accurately, from his life. As his family returned, the thought vanished, and he fell back into his duly appointed role.