Forgot About 80s Style
White feathers lined the living room floor of the Big House, like the remains of a plucked chicken. Clearly, it was madrigal dinner season again. Between Mom and Carrie, all necessary props, table dressings, and costumes for the occasion would somehow get hot-glue-gunned and taped together before the big event.
Meanwhile, Linnea-Irish’s hair was being plastered in its own gluey substance to extract the next layer of blue. Left her looking like a gooey mermaid. So the original bright violet blue was now toned down to pastel greens, grays, blues, and lavenders. Progress.
Dropped back into the school office for another hour of phone-answering, question-answering, whatever-answering while the staff lunched down the hall on chili and cookies for 80’s-themed Teacher Appreciation Day. Many scrunchies.
Four girls studied across from the desk, unable to play outside in the cold during recess – asthma, colds, pulled teeth, hit in the eye with a tetherball, etc.
“Excuse me? How do you pronounce this word?”
“Acacia.” Knew I bought that acacia perfume for a good reason.
Announced gift card winners over the intercom – Steak ‘n Shake, Barnes & Noble, passed Puck’s linebacker teacher in wild African shirt, faux fro, and flowery paper hat.
“Nice hat.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Silverspoon!”
In fact, there was so much 80s-ness going on that Puck had one observation for me at three o’clock that afternoon. “It’s prob’ly going to take the girls years to take off all their make-up.”
After Puck disbanded a batch of recycled cardboard squares from Art class onto the living room floor of the Big House, he sat down to the old kitchen table and organized the new “velvet poster” I bought for him earlier in the afternoon. Six magic markers, ready to go – Swiss-like mountains, hot air balloons, village, wildflowers… Earlier I suggested we work on it together.
“Mom, I want to accomplish this myself, so I feel like I accomplished something.” About ten minutes in, however, he had changed his tune. “Mom? Do you want to color the flowers? … No. Mind! Control yourself! I’m going to do this myself.”
True to his word, he didn’t ask for help again. He was still working on it during the drive home, after corn chowder and biscuits while Dad, Mom, Carrie, and I discussed the future of our podcast.
And the cats napped on Puck’s cardboard squares in the living room.