A Guys' Night
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Izzy’s 13th birthday – the last official teenager of the Silverspoon household.
Tuesday evening, Ben-Hur and Augustus had come over to spend some guy time, (or as the great Justus of Orange would say, “male-bonding”) over pizza. Collette, meanwhile, continued her writings and readings in the other room.
Once the boys started blasting music on the speakers, Collette could only gather bits and pieces of conversations.
Over the pounding of some Salvation Army choir-sounding piece, the boys looked up things on the computer, such as a place where one might order cheese over the Internet, pictures of chalk drawings, and elaborately constructed dolls. And they complained about the tabs on Collette’s computer.
“Oh, shut up,” Collette heard Augustus say later. “You’re the one with the fancy mice.”
Later, Collette heard Ben-Hur talking to the other fellas from the couch.
“So, guys, we need to talk about Collette’s blog,” he was saying. “Then it would be like talking about the blog inside the blog. What’s your name in it, Augustus? Is it Augustus? Because she’ll write about it like this, ‘Later, Collette heard Ben-Hur talking to the other guys from the couch about Collette writing in her blog about what he was saying to them from the couch about her writing about them in her blog…’ It would keep repeating and repeating. Like, a – what do you call it – recursive blog or something.”
“Yeah, like those never-ending Indian stories,” OLeif agreed.
Collette was not entirely sure that she followed the idea of the Indian stories. Later, she heard them later mention something about Pablo growing a handlebar mustache and growing his hair out long. (Except that he couldn’t grow a mustache yet.) Then Ben-Hur mentioned that he would like to stay out in Saint Charles instead of having to drive back for the night and out again in the morning for work.
“Hey, we have the key to Judah’s and Evangeline’s apartment,” OLeif said. “You could stay there tonight.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t Evangeline love that,” Ben-Hur laughed. “They’d know we’d been there.”
“Yeah, Judah would get back and, (sniff, sniff), ‘Something doesn’t smell like when we left.'” OLeif joked.
And then they rung Collette’s Chinese gong until it distorted.
The boys left just before Magnus dropped by a few minutes before 10:30 on his way back from work with OLeif’s birthday present from himself, Ben-Hur, and Augustus – three DVDs of the Evil Dead.
Wednesday morning, the first day of summer, Collette thought about things on the way to the house, watching the colors of the field flowers flash past the window – chickory and Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod, thistles, clover, and what looked like little buttercups. There was something sound and good about every season, even if summer was probably the last favored on her list.
Meanwhile, Starr had once again changed Wallace’s IM away-message to:
ROSES ARE TEH BEST!!!!11!!!!!1!!!
Scout camp was the following evening – the place where scouts suddenly found themselves wearing bells and feathers and face paint, if chosen to play the lead Indian chiefs for the evening. Or they would light smudge pots, sing old Indian chants, or merely wait their turn to be slapped in the chest and enter the Order of the Arrow. Unfortunately, the Boy Scouts were no longer able to be smacked in the chest, as they had been when Dad entered OA. Back in the day, according to Dad, they hit so hard that they rather knocked the wind out of a fellow.