Ch. 225; Vol. 10

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

I was digging through a lot of papers – hard and electric – while Puck dug into oatmeal.

“Are gummy bears only vitamins?”

“No. Sometimes they can be candy, too.”

Puck thought about it. He knows only one gummy bear vitamin a day is allowed, for safety reasons. Didn’t Joe and Wally pig out on half a bottle of them one afternoon – when they were teenagers – just because they tasted good?…

“Can you only eat one of them when they are candy?”

I was tempted to say yes, but of course I couldn’t.

Something about the code of being a mom; you can’t lie to your child.

Puck tapped the miniature bubblegum machine on the table…

“Want some gum?”

Gum…

My earliest childhood memory. Lying flat on my toddler back in the ER, an x-ray mat on my chest, Dad standing over me. Checking for glass in my stomach. I just had to have some of that gum.

Even if it was tiny glass beads in a tiny gumball machine.

“Thanks, bud, but I’ll pass.”

I actually found myself asleep for a few minutes this afternoon.

Usually I would hate myself for that, but this time lying flat on my bed trying to relieve some back tension and “sour” pain was my excuse.

I knew my philosophy of Church Nurseries was correct…

“MOM!”

“What?”

Puck pointed at a paperclip attached to his phonics book.

“What?”

“It’s a FOLDED CLOTH!”

“What is?”

“The FINGERCLIP!”

“Paperclip?… Oh, you mean it looks like the folded cloth Egyptian Hieroglyphic?”

Sometimes I amaze myself at my abilities to interpret Six Year Old Boy.

“Mom? Are cats detected to colors? Like, are they detected to black?”

“Not sure, man… I don’t think cats are attracted to colors, though.”

“So, they’re not detected to red, like humans are detected to computers?”

Six o’clock.

After Puck had whined about a rice bowl for dinner, it didn’t really matter much I guess, because we had someplace else to be.

Thirteen months later, the Ryes were back from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for a month of American visits.

“HESED! HESED! FOLLOW ME!”

It was sort of like they had just seen each other last week, Puck and Hesed. But I guess it also sort of felt like that with all of them. Mom and Dad had brought a bowl of snack crackers and two jugs of Ocean Spray. The Bear was late from traffic, the Ryes were late because of running out of gas in the car, leaving the wallet in the car, the car being half-towed, etc. But in the end, everyone made it.

Three hours later, fireflies, stories, and three happy boys under a hazy crescent.

“BYE BABY HESED!”

Some things just don’t change…