August 17

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Home for the day. Most of it.

At nine o’clock, Collette let Puck have a pink cream cheese mint out of the little silver box in the fridge. Carrie had given it to him after they had made the mints together the previous afternoon. The pink went along perfectly with one of Puck’s recent favorites from 1958, Mom’s and Uncle Mo’s copy of, before Mom was even born, The Cat and the Hat Comes Back!.

“I found a box of those mints in the basement once,” Rose had said earlier. “They were three years old. I ate all of them.”

Collette did a double-take on that one. “Three year-old cream cheese sitting in a dusty box in the basement! How did you not die?”

Only Rose…

In the mid-morning, around watching the washing machine fill and reading through Puck’s library, Puck got out the blue Playdough.

“Look, Mama!” he said happily. “I made a Monsters Incorporated!”

Shortly after eleven o’clock, there was a knock at the door. Puck was excited. He hurried to the UPS man waiting for them.

“Are those my shoes?” he asked.

“Well, I think they are,” said the man, looking at the box. “Here you go.”

Puck gladly took the box, set it on the couch, and hurried back to the open window.

“Thank you!” he called out.

Puck’s new ‘chugs’ arrived, Converse All-Stars, black hi-tops. And he didn’t want to take them off. After the donning of them, he went back to the box and put it on his head, amusing himself with it for the next twenty minutes or so.

Lunch while watching the neighbor burn branches and leaves, with musical selections from Kung Fu Panda, Mulan, the Bee Gees, Turkish and other Eastern Europe techno. Puck was living the good life. As far as preschoolers were concerned at least.

The evening threatened rain. But nothing came. OLeif could be seen out the kitchen window, mowing the back yard with earbuds in his ears listening to a sermon, and a pipe in his mouth.