Chapter Eight
6:52AM
“BOO! Wake up, MOM!”
We’ll get there. The Bear was already up anyway. Good thing, too, because in the process of sidelining me, Puck landed square on The Bear’s pillows. As rude awakenings continued, I was drawn away from another heavy sleep and elaborate madrigal dinners. [I was king.] And something about 1953… Into the new world where Puck imitated Crackers, perched on the dresser at the window squirrel-watching the network of gray tree branches in early sun. And a sore right elbow for no known reason. It passed anyway. But the morning did disappoint. What had appeared to be a gray start quickly panned eggshell blue by mid-morning. Grilling up eggs-in-a-nest which Puck followed up with a pouch of magic markers and his hinged wooden snake, analyzing The Bear’s grade percentages from the first week in class, checking in on Joe’s all-night drive to Fort Carson status… which was actually a change of plans for a four in the afternoon departure, Tuesday, with Chester Hobcoggin.
“Let’s pray for Uncle Joe,” Puck said.
And he did. His prayers for family usually involve…
“God, please take care of ‘so and so’. I know it’s hard to ‘such and such’.”
And he goes from there. He can be surprisingly gentle in word and deed when he has the right attitude going. You can usually tell by the personal space Crackers allows herself when she’s around him. The purring bundle stuffed inside the eggplant blanket beside him on the couch was a pretty good indication this morning. Until…
“Crackers was gnawing my head, MOM!”
So while Puck got busy stringing the army cap as a long tail to his corduroys, serving as a walking bank, I caught up with The Bear. Four hours in class, and he keeps the communication lines open as necessary. For important things like…
“Yes, we still have a ton of Q-tips. I just checked.”
“Louis wants me to play video games with him Saturday night.”
“Magnus wants to have coffee soon, discuss a project.”
“Do you care if I play at this bluegrass thing next month? They’re asking me to come.”
“Do you know there are more than 121,000 libraries in the U.S.?”
Or…
“Go buy me a milkshake.”
Once Puck and I got busy learning more sound combinations in the morning, which will probably go on for another three months until he understands every sound in the English language, he was already distracted…
“Your mouth looks interesting, Mom. Why do people have holes there? What are mouths?…”
We wrapped it up with more food for Puck and a small glass of the last of the pomegranate juice for myself. We tried another round of Wahoo, just to encourage good sportsmanship. When he came in dead last, he still had a smile. Some small accomplishment in the day. We followed that up with the tradition extending from my childhood – another “Little House on the Prairie” for lunch. How many days did the six of us kids sit around the fuzzy television station for an hour every school day to see what happened next in the 1970’s saga of small town old time life. Puck watched eagerly, happy eyes, hiking himself up onto his knees on the antique cushion chair with garden arrangements. Antiques and boys…
The Bear had lunched with the professor and classmates. Boxed pork steak. I opened the bedroom window to fresh, mild air. Straw-grass, dropping sun, hitting panels of metal across the houses built cheap in the 60’s. Puck chewed the end of my Pilot pen, got his lip stuck in the cap for a second, which maybe taught him a lesson. All those times the orthodontist accused me of chewing pen caps in high school. I never chewed pen caps in high school… Puck needed another dance party. They seemed to be effective. He poked his eye with this finger first, still sitting at the table for his Mead notebook writing lesson, occasionally throwing his head back dramatically, proclaiming…
“I think I’m going to die.”
He likes math better. He also has preferences about dinner. Not being such an enormous fan of the chicken parmesan from Monday night – which he ate anyway – I was preparing spaghetti and meat “bulbs” for dinner. A much more appreciated food topic in Puck’s vocabulary. While I prepared the evening, I allowed Puck a reunion with the fuzzy friend from whom he had been banned the rest of the day, due to personality conflict. This reunion, however, was brief…
“Ug. Don’t step in my eye, Crackers.”
Things never really slow down with a kid who was named after the Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes. Twenty minutes of exercise to Indian-bluegrass-German-funk-pop later [I try to please all], even a simple order of switching on the shower…
“My clothes are all soaped [soaked], Mom!”
So was half the bathroom with the shower curtain wide open and the box of silver pins you press onto things that you see in science stores, sitting in the tub. Also natural were the screams of…
“My eyes! My eyes!”
After I finished washing out the coconut shampoo – thoroughly – from his hair. In addition, and natural, were the…
“Mom! Come quick! There are water driplets all over the ceiling!!!”
I added a pan of crispy fries to the oven for dinner. Treat to myself. Puck had been doing well. Until temptation got the better of him. He draped a short piece of spaghetti over his nose…
“Look, Mom. I’m the professor from Felix the Cat.”
I began to wonder why I had given him a shower at all… It pays to have a hungry husband, by the way. Even after he stuffed himself with a packed bowl of spaghetti and meat balls, he was more than ready for a dessert other than Puck’s usual spread of Japanese refreshment. Meaning, fruit. No, The Bear was a little more interested in ice cream.
“Mama!” Puck screeched from his bedroom, already tucked down after a chapter of The Happy Hollisters circus mystery, “Could I listen to the Bible?!”
Can’t turn down that request. He popped in the CD and shuffled quickly back to bed for the first half of the New Testament while The Bear ferreted in a paper sack of brownie ice cream sundae waffle bowl to join me in a viewing of “Blast From the Past”. No regrets.