Boys and Their Ways

There’s nothing quite like begin woken up to your tank of a Kindergartner sitting heavily on your back (aka “lungs”), practically head-butting you like a grown cat… “It’s morning time, Mom!”… with enough joy to suggest you just won Publishers Clearing House to get you up at a late 7:11. Plus, considering the heavy steel bones my son adopted from his father, you can imagine the crushing sensation I occasionally endure when Puck forgets that… I am not OLeif. Add a small squishy pink rubber “squid” [whale] from the “Puck and Grandma Box” blowing air into your ear to complete the effect, and I was absolutely fully awake.

Eggs in various forms, laundry soap, and destructive-attack-the-glass-patio-door-with-ferocious-ferocity-kitten-paws felines sent us into the nine o’clock hour where Puck’s room was getting the shakedown.

“I don’t want toys anymore, Mama,” he declared valiantly. “I am a big man. I don’t need any more toys.”

I can work with that.

We got a lot done. I was proud of the young chap for being willing to part with so much. In fact, he seemed just a little too eager to get going on the age progression. I caught up with him at the kitchen table later staring off into space muttering to himself…

“I wish I was a grown-up. Poof. I wish I was a grown-up. Poof. I wish I was a grown-up. Poof…”

Then we read about beetles and baseball, and lunched on carrots, muenster cheese, walnuts, and watermelon. But not before a small set of calamities. Puck left the meal with a mildly busted up right hand. Cat scratches – I knew I forgot to trim something. And glass.

That last one wasn’t my fault.

Somehow the kid cracked the glass handle of an hors d’oeuvres pick in half using only his fingers. What did I say about bones of steel? No tears, though. He didn’t even realize it until he noticed the blood spidering across his palm later. Three bandages and a black glove Darth-Vader style later, the punk was ready for the afternoon.

It’s good to have the Bear back early, which happens occasionally. He returned under windows opened to cool gray breezes with a ten-pounder sack of Greek texts to join us for another round of Caesar salads. One of the rare family meals in which he has been able to partake over the last couple of years, poor chap.

And you know all that stuff that never ends with piecing genealogies, creating websites, corralling cats, eating dark chocolate bars…

Floozie thought she had a fine thing going around six-thirty. She found herself a bunny munching blades of green – yes, green – grass in the backyard, just outside the kitchen window, obliviously and rather stupidly enjoying his own less violent dinner. Envisioned herself a delicious evening snack, I imagine. To console herself, she scratched up the antique chair in the living room. Or tried to, anyway.

So I guess the Olympics are over, by the way. I hear it was pretty great. That’s what I get for owning two televisions stuffed with fuzz.