Ch. 151; Vol. 10
Carrie notified me on the drive into the city…
“Five percent chance of long track tornados.”
Fifteen percent would have been considered extreme. Our evening plans weren’t looking great.
“Just $1.99. Oh. Yeah.”
I didn’t know what Puck was talking about at first, but he was sitting by Rose’s floor fan watching his empty grab-and-go grape applesauce pack fly into the air when he set it on top of the fan…
“For $1.99. Oh. Yeah. It doesn’t pop. It’s very sturdy. It doesn’t pop when you put it on the fan. And this golfball is orange… Very specifically.”
– At this point, he was actually impersonating a redneck accent, which I have no idea where he even heard something like that in the first place. –
“And if you go golfin’, it’s just for one ninety nine.”
So while my son ran an impromptu hillbilly infomercial, I checked on the weather stats for the evening. The camel rides at the Science Center had already been postponed.
Turtle Park was close. What turned into one boy – Puck – running up and down the cement shells, quickly became twelve or thirteen.
Lightening shot the skies through. A little. We canceled the evening in anticipation.
“Let’s go see Flight of the Butterflies at the Science Center instead,” I told Puck.
He was up for butterflies. So was I.
Four o’clock was our showtime. So we had an hour and a half to walk around and study and learn.
Puck is fearless. And he has no sense of personal boundaries. Maybe most six year-olds don’t. But when I saw him scoot his chair within a breath’s space of the teenage boy on the computer beside his own – just to get a glimpse of the other games available – I wondered if I should say something. I guess it didn’t bother the boy. He talked about as loud as Puck. I could hear their conversation from halfway across the room. To Puck, everyone’s a friend. Unless they tell you to “shut up” on a playground.
When we found ourselves first in line for the film beside an upside-down bag of popcorn on the carpeted entry, we ran up three games of UNO. But that was about all Puck could handle…
“We’ve got to stand up NOW, MOM! People are coming! We’ve go to be FIRST!”
The lessons we have to learn. To prove my point, I remained seated, casually returning the UNO cards to their beat-up cardboard box.
“Don’t swing that rope, Puck,” I cautioned him.
The twisted red rope gated the crowd from pushing into restricted areas. And to a boy, I guess that means he was meant to swing it back and forth…
“But bugs might be on that rope, and they might be enjoying it!” was Puck’s explanation.
When we entered – first – over the unfortunate splash of buttered popcorn littering the floor, Puck made a dash for the very top of the theater, finding us two comfy, isolated seats together…
“Mom! See! People are bringing popcorn in here! I told you!”
“Well, they couldn’t when I was a kid. So I guess I thought they still didn’t let you do that.”
“Well, Mom, you shouldn’t have thought [fought] that thought [fought] because things [fings] change, you know that.”
Puck was great during the film. He kept most questions to himself. And later I found out that he had to use the facilities during the entire forty minutes of butterflies in Toronto, Texas hill country, and Mexican evergreen forests. But he didn’t bother to tell me about it. There was only one comment he found he had to make as the film started rolling. He leaned over to me in a loud whisper-laugh…
“Mom, sometimes I find myself having my mouth open DURING THE MOVIE!”
So it wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was flocks of monarchs and another memory with my son, no matter what we do I guess.
And those storms did cancel Shakespeare, by the way. That ominous skulking black-green, blackening the streets. Shivers. The good kind. Deluge – out the front door. The mom from across the street watched, too. And then… the sirens. Sandwiched between Lincoln and Franklin. Just at bedtime. All over the place.
