Always Prepared

I checked in with Joe that morning. The chap was now sixteen days away from the wedding and decided that it was about time to get those five cavities and a root canal looked at. Or was that six cavities and a root canal? Either way, needles, anesthetic, pain.

Puck took about forever to wrap up school that morning, which quickly became that afternoon. Maybe he was thinking about the “pirate moose” cookie waiting with a glass of milk. Our baker friend from church had delivered a wide and delicious assortment of her homemade cookies for taste-testing at the Big House Wednesday evening. She would officially provide the rehearsal dinner dessert table in two weeks, and needed requests. Puck and I reaped the benefits of overflow. Hence the sugar with a broken-off leg. Puck’s “moose pirate.”

He was also busy admiring his own handiwork in the red Mead notebook flattened in front of him on the kitchen table:

“My handwriting is a copy machine,” he boasted.

I did not additionally inflate his ego.

Wind, pollen, heat.

Puck and I drove off to pick up eggs and a new emergency toothbrush for Puck. As we walked hand-in-hand across the Schnuck’s parking lot, I realized that Puck probably looked a little unusual: normal blue flip-flops, green sports shorts, striped tank top, but then Joe’s old moldy green fuzzy winter hat pawned off some inner city Chicago free shop maybe ten years ago. Puck loved it. And no one asked him any questions about it.

So in the beautiful afternoon that was our Thursday, Puck ran out with the green wooly hat and another identical red wooly hat to meet Eddie at Anna’s bus stop. As he explained to me before he ran out, slamming the door:

“MOM! You know how Mario has a red hat and Luigi has a green hat? Well, that’s what these hats are! I can’t wait to show Eddie!”

When they plowed back through the door a few minutes later, Puck was still wearing the green hat, Eddie the red.

Later, after further escapades in the neighborhood, Puck came running wildly back to the house, slamming the door and locking it behind him against a horde of four to six girls brandishing swimming noodles:

“They’re meanies!” he declared. “They are hitting me with those things! I’m going to get my armor and put on some extra padding!”

I tried to advise him that three shirts, a hooded poncho, shorts, pants, two pairs of socks, shoes, the moldy green hat, and his Minecraft ball cap were not advisable for 86-degree weather, but he was determined, and returned to battle.

That night, rain, thunder. The whole word a wet, green garden.