Chapter Seventy
Yeah… Puck wasn’t up till almost nine. I should have expected that. Nothing like a well-rested Kindergartner. He’s used to 11-12 hours a night, so scrape off a small chunk of that, and we still had a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young one, as Mom always puts it… I poured dish soap and boiling water down the bathroom sink. Apparently cleaning Puck’s muddy boots in there wasn’t a great idea after all. Puck pressed push-pins into the Dubble Bubble box from Julie’s birthday party…
“I’m making a snowman,” he explained, with all the pomp of a mad inventor.
Whatever that pomp may be. He tried to beg an Ice Cube chewing gum out of my book bag…
“Not till you’re done with your reading lesson, bud.”
“But, Mom. I had a long day though.”
It was about ten o’clock in the morning… The Bear had too many good things to say about the Shepherd’s Conference. Almost as soon as he had gripped me in his signature grizzly hug, he handed me two brown paper boxes wrapped with decorative taping and thick glossy black ribbon. An ESV Journal Bible and Randy Alcorn’s “Heaven”. Puck had been gifted an artistic story of the martyr – Guido De Bres. We began to explore these new tree treasures Monday morning. And it was already noon.
“Hawai’i it is…”
Rose had texted me around two o’clock. She wasn’t exactly thrilled. I guess volcanos and snorkeling and lush vegetation isn’t her cup of tea. So then I convinced her to settle with a cruise to Jamaica and Mexico. I think they slipped the Bahamas in there, too. Maybe it’s not the same 1950’s glam she would have preferred. Because I think almost anyone would have liked south of the border 60 years ago. But I booked the trip, and – as Tevye says…
“What’s done. Is done.”
Maybe that was someone else. I can’t remember. Anyway, it only took five phone calls. All but one involving direct lines to family. So while I did that, Puck gathered the mail. I find it a little disorienting reciting credit card numbers over the phone and monitoring the interactions of my son with passerby on the street, but I managed to halfway bake both items at hand. At least he wasn’t directing traffic this time, I don’t think. He surfaced with a stack of mostly useless paper. But USCIS returned some form that would involve a balance due because someone forgot to mention an additional biometrics fee of $170. Everyone’s got to make a living. I did what they told me; what can I say. Naturally, Puck found it necessary to run Calvin-style [meaning buck-naked] through the living room while he was waiting for his shower to heat up, yelling in song-tones…
“Dufuuuus! Dufuuuus! Dufuuuus!…”
Informing me that he was waiting for…
“…the shower to cool down.”
Then the laundry honked. Puck was taking an inexorably long amount of time wrapping things up in the bathroom before dinner. Probably to avoid that flying saucer fresh from the farm, known as an omelet on a plate…
“Uh, Mom?… This dinner is disgusting.”
Reprimand. So while he fooled around across the cracker box house in the bathroom, I read the introduction to my Heaven book. And according to page xix, Philip of Macedon [who I believe is one of my great-great-great-etc. grandfathers] “commissioned a servant to stand in his presence each day and say, ‘Philip, you will die.’” Not too shabby of an idea, actually.
After I told Puck to…
“Speed it up, punk,” for about the sixth time…
I kept reading… I should have known The Bear would be particularly starving that night. After five days of catered meals and as much as he could want, then back to the moderated containers I packed him at the whimsy of my kitchen… which is always unpredictable… and if I had really thought through the whole thing, I would have saved him the half of the fat omelet Puck didn’t eat, in addition to his own… So while I tried not to scratch my neck after carelessly washing it with olive oil soap [it had been doing really well for the last two days, actually], The Bear dismantled his To Do list before diving into dinner. A three-egg omelet that suddenly looked much more like a “one”…