Ch. 207; Vol. 10
11:00PM, Thursday night.
Rose had just IM’d me briefly about her day in San Diego…
“Went to the horse races and all that jazz…”
All that jazz…
Thunk,
thump.
“I think Puck fell out of bed.”
“Naw…”
“Maybe you should go check on him…”
The Bear was gone for a few minutes, so I was pretty sure I was right…
“Yeah, it was sort of like he set up camp down there. He was still asleep on a blanket on the floor with a pillow under his head and the comforter over him.”
My son.
6:30AM, Friday morning.
“Bye, Collette,” The Bear whispered, so as not to disturb the Puckster in the other room…
“I just dreamt that you dumped me,” was my half-awake, and gracious, send-off.
[Somewhere around Mom extolling a fancy fish feast restaurant someplace in the city.]
“Doesn’t work that way,” The Bear grinned.
At least I think he grinned; I wasn’t completely awake yet, I don’t think.
Puck was always exploding with ideas.
This morning it was a pulley system from the lamppost to the climbing tree with the scruffy blue rope from yesterday while I sorted piles of Puck-things on the other side of the window.
Then when he disappeared for a few minutes…
Not difficult to find.
I saw a heavy green bush rustling on the back fence, two red shoes sticking out from the bottom.
Five minutes later he ran back inside with a transparent red frisbee golf disc…
“LOOK WHAT I FOUND IN THE BRANCHES, MOM!”
He smelled like a boy.
“It was a little blocked by branches, but I’m a stron [strong] man, Mom. I could give it back to the neighbors. They might say no though. But I think they got a bunch of frisbees by now. You never know. I’m gonna polish it wiff a cloff every day… It shall be blue. And don’t worry. This cloff is old. Yeah… This is the goodest frisbee I ever hah-d [had]… You know, you can find things if you ever know that it’s there. For all those years it’s been there, it could have been there since I was a baby. You never know. It could have, Mom.”
Francis stopped in for more mathematical advice between sky drizzles – the first we’ve had in awhile it feels like. And by “awhile”, I mean a week. Anyway, it was the usual swap of uncle-torturing-nephew sister-advice snack-on-anything-available session.
And while Francis peeled out at 4:30 for a six-hour shift at work, Puck and I switched on movie night’s Kirk Douglas in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. And a pile of 80’s Glam Sharpie Markers in effort of the big 259-paged project for Puck’s birthday present… in 2015… I sat with my boys and two sacks of Chick-Fil-A.
Forty-five minutes later, I had finished…
…one page.
Who knew a kid could love an international-flag-colored butterfly and his adventurous stickman owner so much?
“Puck, did you feed Crackers?”
“Oh, not yet.”
Tell-tale rattle of heavy cat food bag and Puck trying to click his tongue to get Crackers to run for dinner. Somehow it only works when I do it though…
“Well, I’ll be darn, Crackers!”
Wimp-dot-com videos for the boys.
They love that stuff.
