Chapter Four
Snaps of lightening crackled across the comforter in the dark. A bundle of purring gray fuzz had wormed her way into the warm folds, waiting for the day to begin. I guess Puck hadn’t taken the bait – still slumbering heavily in his green room – so Crackers switched her charms to the lady of the house. Whatever static electricity had built up from her silky coat transferred to the yellow cotton as I rolled determinedly out of bed to start the day. Crackers beat me to the kitchen where she threw herself open like a pill bug on the linoleum, trying to play cute and cajole a good breakfast. Juicy pork, maybe? Fresh fish? Puck instead offered the standard quarter cup out of the bag in the basement.
The air was frosty as usual. The Bear flipped on Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, which fit the lines of cement stretching into the city under pale early sun. A Chiquita banana truck was parked on an entrance ramp, still. Maybe we were riding out earlier than I had thought. 7:44AM.
I guess I felt like testing myself today. Four hours in the student center with Puck while across the campus The Bear ate Greek nouns for breakfast. And lunch. Sometimes I wonder how the old timers did it. Pioneers snowed in for months. Twelve by twelve foot cabin. One rag doll. The family Bible. How… I guess I cheated a little. The fact that we could read about robots on the wave of dead mustard couches wedged between an equally dead upright piano and chronically ill foosball table… wasn’t helping my martyred cause. Puck marched right in, scuffed yellow wellies pounding the carpet, slung his green back-pack onto the couch, removed the long-suffering batting helmet – yes – from his flock of blonde hair, and lifted the ping-pong paddle basket from the piano. He knew the drill. Green chalkboards. White tin ceiling, white brick walls, Israeli tomb artifacts locked behind glass and sand in the foyer… Things haven’t really changed the last four and a half years. Sometimes I don’t really know how time passes so quickly. Yes, we did some classwork, ping-pong golf, a little wall-clock watching – there were three of those…
“Do you want to draw tree house plans?” I asked him at some point.
“No…” he sighed. “That’s too obvious.”
Ok… But somehow it’s already ten o’clock, and we sit on the floor counting the shiny silver coins out of my wallet. When we’re alone in the student center for a few minutes, the international flags hang still on the walls, we scrounge the vending machines. Grandma’s peanut butter cookies – 65 cents. White cheddar Cheez-its – 65 cents. With a dime and nickel to spare, we split the two crinkly packages back on the couches and contemplate our surroundings. The cookies might be a little stiff from the cold. Puck crumples the packages into the trash. Then a one-year-and-ten-month-old grinning toddler with wavy black hair watches Puck for awhile, his grandma looking on. His name is Moses, and he seems to find Puck sort of funny. They mess around with the foosball table while his grandma and mom talking about eating beans for dinner, and if they’ve gone bad yet or not. Of course I’m naturally forgetting about Calvin as well. The tyrant six year-old and his tiger pal. If nothing else, Puck will giggle away an hour without thinking. So while he’s stashed himself under the mustard couches chuckling over administering brain surgery to snowmen or muttering something about forgetting to “pay the gravity bill” by way of excuse to skip out on school, I’m distracted listening to foreign languages ring softly from different corners of the student center. Korean. I’m pretty sure that hall-of-Norwegian-kings table sponsors a group of Korean speakers. Then a laughing, younger group finds the ping-pong table. I’m almost certain they’re speaking Japanese. Puck pops his head out of the couches.
“When’s Dad coming back?”
He asks me once every minute, while the orange ping-pong slaps back and forth between words I don’t understand. Finally, The Bear strides in, seatbelt buckle bag latched to his back, empty coffee mug. He sees the group of Korean speakers and recognizes one of them from his preaching class. We’re introduced. A few light handshakes. I wonder if maybe women aren’t supposed to shake hands in Korea. Friendly smiles though. The man’s wife sees Puck, who has just removed his batting helmet again…
“Oh, he’s so handsome!” she says softly.
The Bear knows it’s late for lunch. Almost 1:30. To compensate, he picks up apple juice – the good kind, turkey and cheese rounds, crackers, sandwiches. They might be from QT, America’s fuel station of choice, apparently, but we’re grateful. And can’t tell the difference.
I get a mini check-up from the family only by way of a brief email from Carrie and a photo from another sunrise hike on Joe’s end, this time toting not only German and Rudolph, but Izzy, Charlie, and Charlie’s old brother. Snow boarding. Ice skating. Those boys get around. Around enough to make it difficult to walk, apparently. Tack on three hours of truffle-tiering at Vanbuskirk’s that night.
Puck and I were making subtle adjustments for the next adoption interview. I knew the Colombia Program Director wouldn’t care about smudges or cracks in the wall. But all the same, I taped two photo copies of Calvin & Hobbes – in color – over the stains on Puck’s wall, rubbed in by the dark wood from the crib years ago. And I painted a few similar furniture rubbings on the wall in the living room, the wrong shade of yellow, of course. Then Puck joined me in the kitchen to continue his written saga of Donkey and his days…
“Crackers,” he watched her scratch the glass. “That’s not the way to say hello to your cat shadow.” [Sigh.] “Cats are so much trouble.”
“Domino’s. Domino’s…”
The chant would continue until I gave in. The Bear was hungry. And not for the fat turkey sandwich on Italian bread with a side of apples, which is exactly what Puck munched through in a heartbeat while watching “The Rescuers Down Under”. So I caved in. After all, Joe was working, Rose was studying, Carrie was trying to resolve the medical threat to her piloting future, and Puck was an hour past his bedtime trying not so hard to fall asleep under the arbor of glowing redbirds roped around his headboard…
“Unplug the birds, Puck!”
So a box of bread, meat, light sauce, and heavy cheese was on its way. Good thing, too. I was swamped in genealogy fatigue – yes, I believe that is actually a thing – and ready to discard the frivolities of digital records for a fat slice of pseudo-Italian goodness.