Bronze Medal
So…
Reality.
Reality, reality.
Now that the last seven to eight months of a great show [especially considering all the significant turn-over and extensive impacting injuries] had been rolled up and stuffed into the back of the dresser drawer until spring, I had to deal with the rest of life. I knew it had been tinkering around in there someplace…
1) Puck’s cold. He was very disappointed to miss church Wednesday evening, which had been slotted for a viewing of “The Butter Battle” with buttered toast for snacks.
2) And the big emerald city curtain reveal of The Bear’s scoliosis and reverse curvature of the neck, apparently.
3) Eying Crackers’ recent incision for signs of trouble.
4) My boys needed a few wardrobe staples to complete their autumn wardrobe, including a few Gymboree steals for Puck featuring dinosaurs and UFOs and more fire hose pants for The Bear, which he goes through a little less quickly than Target jeans. A year, as opposed to a month, apparently.
5) The internet began cutting out again, late morning.
6) Or the fact that my son wanted to be a “rock” for Hallowe’en. With a tree on top.
I was still entertained by my dreams as well. This time it was an original screenplay in black and white featuring a priest named Peter. He wore a hat. Until Puck lunged onto the bed with an optimistic…
“I feel great!”
“No, Puck. You can’t go to church tonight.”
“When is Saturday, Mama?”
“In three days…”
“No, Mama. Three days is two days from now.”
This reality continued into the afternoon. Eggs in a nest for lunch, per Puck’s request [while I tried to retain sanity teaching the digital clock to a kid who has so many questions stuffed up in his head, he can’t remember what a “ten” looks like]. I sent him to sit in the corner to ponder a few previous sins during the lunch hour. Though unhappy with his sentence, I heard him two minutes later saying…
“Please help me not to go to disobedience land. Please help me to get better so I can go to church and worship You.”
Although Puck and I are both well aware that this Sunday also entails the afternoon Hallowe’en games and candy exhibition, the moment was not lost on me.
Meanwhile, I tried to replicate the evening Puck would be missing at church by reserving this Dr. Seuss film [which I confess I find to occasionally feel slightly disturbing] at the library and firing up the toaster for dinner. We began this endeavor with another walk to the library on a warm day of balmy winds and blue skies, watching for snake holes and/or snakes in the small wispy white grass field outside the neighborhood.
Puck served up a drill of coughs at the library check-out some time later.
“Oh, are you sick?” the librarian asked, rather loudly, I thought.
“I was,” he replied soberly, then added, as if he had recently taken up the bubonic plague, “I got The Cough.”
Back in the refuge of home away from unexpected 80’s…
“I had to take my shirt off, Mom!” he yelled. “I’m all sweaty and I have to take it off! If I don’t, I will get ammonia!”
He later proceeded to pound himself in the head with a foam baseball bat…
“The bone doesn’t break,” he explained.
Then we read from our endless stack of books until my jaw just about popped off.
“You’d better just sign stuff, Mama,” Puck ordered. “No more talking else or your jaw will pop off, and you’ll have to wait until you grow a new one.”