A Young Man's Monday
“Go bodder dem instead!”
Poof. Puck, grinning, tossed the sleek cat on our bed and left the room. Crackers can be a little whiny in the mornings, screeching for breakfast long before a necessary hour, and I guess Puck decided she needed to bug us instead: the cat grandpa and cat grandma. She didn’t hang around. Her better hope for extra food was with the young chap in the kitchen.
Puck stuck a pencil behind his ear during school, looking important, and claiming important observations throughout math, reading, and writing, etc., such as, “Dad’s belly is bouncy though. I run into it all the time. It’s like a pillow with a huge feader in it.” (One day the “th’s” will come; they will.) Or, during the poorly presented Irish brogue of an old Canadian novel, he nixed it by explaining that, “I don’t like that accent, Mom. It reminds me of British. Is British in England? I don’t like the buildings they build.” No clue; honestly. And when the dogs began barking in the next yard, Puck lifted the fuzzy kid from her condo and brought her to the glass door, sing-songing, “Crackers, look! Your favorite man’s here!”
By lunch, biting my peanut butter honey wheat toast into the shape of France, Puck swung skinny-jeaned legs under Nike sweatshirt and blonde bed-head that doesn’t usually correct itself, even when buzzed.
In the bitter afternoon of light wind rattling through sunny teen temps that had just been seniors on Sunday, Puck sat on the couch disassembling my wedding gift spice wrack, which had long expired in use, strapping the pieces back together in alternate structures with blue painter’s tape. Screws, ball bearings, plastic circles all over the cushions.
The squirrels’ circus performance had completely emptied the sunflower seeds in two days, flat. I did not refill. Sure, we had some crazy wild banshee wind in the night. Out of nowhere, tearing down the street, with no snow, ice, or rain. Capable of loosening seeds from a plastic feeder. But darned if I didn’t see those ornery bushy creatures drain that half a feeder’s worth of seeds in an hour or less.
El Oso walked in twenty minutes before Puck’s bedtime – a son scrubbed free of mashed potatoes smeared into his eyebrows (a tense episode of “I Love Lucy” accounting for it) and waterfalls of milk bubbles – for books on the couch and reheated pork chops.
Puck’s Weekly What-do-You-Want-to-be-When-You-Grow-Up Status:
“Everything.”