Ch. 121; Vol. 10
Clink, clink.
Puck was already at the table in his jams, hacking clay.
I rubbed at my eyes.
“Here, Mom,” he held up some bright chunks of clay. “You want to be the planet maker?”
Scratch.
Crackers’ claw swiped Puck’s ankle in a game that she thought was a game and Puck didn’t.
“Ow! Crackers. Mom, I need a band-aid.”
“You don’t need a band-aid.”
“I think blood might flow out of there.”
“It won’t.”
Half an hour later…
“Ah! Mom! I need a band-aid. It hurts again.”
“Are you a mouse?”
“No. But it hurts, Mom, it hurts!”
Rainbows dripped over Puck’s octopus-attacking-18th-century-sailing-vessel t-shirt, distracting him from other things.
Like math.
“Mom, band-aid!”
“Get over it, man.”
While Puck dripped with rainbows, I dripped with sympathy.
“PLEASE, MOM!”
“What? Are you a little girl in a princess skirt?”
“HA HA HA HA!”
I guess my psychological tricks were ineffective.
“Mom, you want to hear a joke?”
“No. Get back to work.”
“PLEASE, MOM? It’s really funny!”
“Fine.”
“Ok… ‘AAAAAHGH!!!!!… Why did that penny just bite me?’ AH HA HA HA HA!!”
My son.
Puck was inventing excuses to avoid the nap I thought advisable due to the River City Rascals game that night. Despite the half hour he was silent in a dark, quiet room, he was still inventing excuses…
“You know where eye juice spawns and it turns into crust, Mom? That place hurts.”
Bisquick pancake mix and Old Navy rubber balls: two essential errands on the afternoon sandwiched between Literature and Social Studies.
On the short drive back…
“I’m not going to college, Mom.”
Serious pudgy jaw in the rearview mirror.
“Yay.”
[I have ideas about college since I attended so many years ago.]
“I will live with you and Dad. And then I will look for a for-sale house in this neighborhood. But if I cannot find one, Mom, then I’m sorry, but I will have to go.”
Puck had only one question after his Spanish lesson that afternoon…
“How do you say, ‘Do you want to play Minecraft?’”
Game in O’Fallon: wildlife in the creek: peepers and crickets. Funnel Cake fries; I guess those do exist. Puck licked powdered sugar out of the paper bowl. Counseled other children on the ‘Do Not Sit On The Wall’ placards. Another two children for eating peanut shells off the ground. They just stared back at him, completely engrossed in those delicious shells. By the seventh inning, my son was tumbling down the green hill beside us. Over and over and over again…
