Chapter Fourteen
Jiffy blueberry muffin mix – the kind without real blueberries of course, not-yet-blossomed daffodils crowding out the driveway, lonely summer mornings where everything is bigger and shadier and more spread out and wide… at least there weren’t any hurricanes or armageddons this time…
Sometimes Puck gets a little carried away with the freedoms of life. I found him half-dancing around in his robot underwear, somewhere between jams and clothes, distracted with the idea of washing the living room windows again. Suddenly it had been plunged in sunlight. The tree was gone, the broken rattan shade – or whatever – was gone, and I was washing the Caribbean-worthy white curtains for the first time in… whatever. And with the sunlight, came smudges and fingerprints on the glass. I curbed his enthusiasm for the moment, directing him back to his plate of oranges, biscuits, and… his clothes. Until he joined me in the bedroom where I was making the bed, watching from his perch on the blue headboard.
“Come down, Puck,” I encouraged him, tugging on the yellow spread.
“But, Mom. I can’t come down while you’re ‘nea-ting’ the bed. I would mess it up.”
A crunchy crust of frost patterned the windows as The Bear rolled out to his first full week of work since mid-December, to see what he had missed, still waiting on his J-term grades. Monday was a little more hopping than usual. Rose had a big certification exam at 9:45, charging up for a half-day of work. Carrie had a consultation with Dr. Moon – Dad’s old high school buddy – regarding her flight physical – at two o’clock. Francis was making a final presentation for his Eagle project before construction sometime that morning, if memory served. Joe was flying in from Colorado Springs late that night. And Puck had found my old CLEP notebook which he was deconstructing sheet by sheet into his own repurposed notebook. For myself – packing off a load for Goodwill with The Bear, processing payment for his spring Greek semester, resolving extended family matters with Carrie, replacing batteries in Puck’s wall moon, crafting cheesy bread for my own breakfast – which I almost forgot about, checking in with Rose about her big day, repairing the couch lamp cord with electrical tape, washing those curtains with three loads of laundry, scheduling Puck’s six year-old check-up for the spring, and by then it was almost ten. Rose then phoned me before eleven..
“I passed!”
It wasn’t much later that I heard The Bear raked in an 83% and 97% on two more graded quizzes, and promised to take Rose to lunch for her achievement. So far, it was a successful morning. Even threw my book bag in the wash for grins. Not that seven point five years of ink stains will disappear after all that, but it needed a rinse anyway. During our lunch-hour “Little House on the Prairie”, Puck was curious to know if Jack, the faithful white sheep-looking dog, would ever die.
“Eventually… yes…”
Immediately he departed the kitchen table with his nose stuck high in the air, declaring that he would “never watch that movie again!” We discussed the situation and he returned, ready for more of the plot, as I explained that Jack would still be alive for many episodes to come. And I worked on. Even while I clean and organize, as I have to do every day no matter what’s going on, I find, Puck was involved in all sorts of endless projects. Now that he had compiled a new notebook-scheduler of campus maps, GRE registration forms, and informational maps of the Alps, he had moved onto a paper-thin plastic wall chart of various continental flags, which he intended on adhering to his wall…
“Mom?” he asked, retreating from his room during the first few minutes of Quiet Hour, holding a clear push pin between two fingers. “Where is the hammer?”
I can’t keep up with the chap. I knew it was a mistake to leave two more tubs of my high school era papers and notes from Mom’s and Dad’s on the living room floor before sorting and shelving in the basement. Then he was requested to critique one of “Uncle Red Strike’s” new songs, which he liked very much after the first three notes, and reasoned via IM…
“I like the music, [Uncle Red Strike], because it was really old-fashioned. I liked it.”
Puck hurried out of his room with another paper map, this one of Spain and Portugal. He laid it flat on the floor and began prancing around on it in his white socks…
“You want to help me neat them down, Mom? There’s a lot of bumps, Mom. Help me.”
Of course then he turned it into a puzzle “with fringe”. And he was asking for projects involving scissors, tape, old sweatshirts, cloth, “stitch witchery” [thanks to inspiration from “Sun”], while I was barely able to keep track of news feeds back and forth between The Bear and myself and a few squares of milk chocolate to soothe sanity. And Puck wrapped up “Island of the Blue Dolphins” while I checked in on Carrie’s tricky and still inconclusive situation involving the Class 3 physical. And then there’s having to keep an eye on Puck during arithmetic because – even though he claims to love it – his zeros end up only inspiring Iron-Man-worthy robots with paned window stomachs…
“Puck, you need to finish the next problem…”
“I already did it,” he shook his head at me like a businessman just having signed a multi-million dollar deal like a breeze. “Two plus two is six.”
I mixed two bowls of taco salad for Puck and myself at the usual five o’clock dinner. Crackers participated. Lettuce, salsa, beef, beans, cheddar, and all. Except maybe the tortilla chips. Somehow this left Puck hiccoughing as he belted out a sort-of-had-a-tune “Jesus Loves Me” – he was starting to get there – while pulling on his blue space jams…
“Mom, did God create hiccups?”
“Yes…”
“See what I mean, hiccups? You’re only a little bean!”
I guess “bean” is an insult in Puck’s world. He was still awake an hour later after a tired Bear returned with a container of root killer, which was twice as expensive as I had expected, and only meant that maybe we would pour it down the main drain six times a year instead of twelve. I mean, when the preventative medicine already adds up to half the cost of repairing the ultimate surgery in the end anyway… why bother? I reserved at least two bowls of taco salad for him for his pains, while Crackers roamed around hunting for more, and Puck tried to communicate with us via the familiar sign language of banging on his bedroom wall.