How to Have Fun
Puck had found the pasta.
He marched around gripping a handful of dried spaghetti with a grin equal to discovering the sunken Spanish mother-load off the coast of Florida. Like aunt, like nephew, I guess. He munched away while the Bear – in newly splattered bleach speckled Duluth pants [not my fault] – taught Puck some brief yo-yo tricks before biking out to work.
Then Puck spilled his milk all over the linoleum.
So Puck finished the final and 100th lesson of his reading program today.
Can’t say he’s fluent, but the six month-study deserved celebration. So we went out, just the two of us, at 10:45. We started with “Blackbeard’s Ghost” on film at the library – they actually carried two copies of this legendary Peter Ustinov comedy – and half an hour at the park. I like watching the little things that happen in peoples’ lives in public places, things that “don’t really matter”, but altogether make the world a little more interesting – two dads providing a play-date for their kids while sharing a bench and doing everything in their control to appear mucho macho, a chocolate pudding cup rolled out of a gold car on the pavement and forgotten, an elderly man biking the outer road with packs attached by the wheels, picking up trash in the prairie wildflowers and brush…
“I made another new friend!” Puck declared to me as we left the park.
Doesn’t he always.
“But they never come back,” Puck went on. “I guess they just become big kids and go to school so they can’t come back.”
Logic.
Or maybe just too much Calvin & Hobbes.
Then we joined Target, where Puck chose a Häagen–Dazs mini vanilla ice cream out of all the glass cases of tempting forbiddens.
I cooked him that spaghetti for lunch.
He was one absolute grease ball of butter – and I really didn’t use that much – by the time he was a happy stuffed kid on two dirty feet.
“I’m letting the baby kitten rest in my top clothes drawer, Mom,” Puck announced from his room during Quiet Hour.
“Well… she’s going to get hair over all your socks.”
“Oh, I don’t care, Mom.”
“You don’t, eh?”
I guess you wouldn’t; you’re a boy, I thought to myself.
“Besides, Mom, all of those things are already made out of hair.”
“You think your socks are made out of hair?”
“Yup… Sheep hair.”
Again, that logic.
For round two of parks and their ways, Puck found zero companions with whom to forge the eternal bond of friendship. I offered myself as a humble substitute.
“YES!!!” came the heavily favored response from the grin between two creamy-rose sun-lit ears, like those thin alabaster vases you find in museums.
My general physiology is apparently not designed to withstand the violet electrical shock produced by thick molded tubing poured from plastic flecked like vanilla bean ice cream. Like a beetle-sized firecracker tossed in a beetle-sized campfire. Every time. I also noticed the festive paint of the metal bars and bridgework, festooned with silver sparkles. I wonder how many tax cents per person to add glitter to jungle gym paint. [I really don’t think like this, honestly.]
“I kind of get the idea I might be too big for this stuff,” I told Puck after round three of climbing the “rock” wall. “I might break something.”
“Oh,” Puck replied, unaffected. “Would the police come and wrestle you down to the ground?”
Fortunately for all parties, a six year-old boy arrived several minutes later, accompanied by sisters and slurpies to make amends for my poor play-skills.
The evening.
Ah. Peter Ustinov. One of my favorites.
Puck was laughing so hard during the pirate-y track meet of Godolphin College from that well-loved 1960’s goofball flick, he could hardly stop himself.
“I just got so laughter!” he giggled.
Meanwhile, the Bear was hunkered downtown for coffee appointments and potential midnight concerts, so I made my own fun by watching true-to-life baseball graphics and scores – when the modem and routers and wires and connections were all actually cooperating at the same, checking in on four separate NL matches throughout the country, and mending the previously stated wires and connections whenever possible.
I think I definitely win the Who-Got-The-Most-Out-Of-Their-Friday-Night Contest.