How We Live
Joe and Jaya walked in late during a prayer. Joe shot a guilty look back to me and took a seat beside his girl. Carpet face. I guess all this talk about beard growing and/or harvesting and whatever had inspired Joe to just let it all sprout.
Puck ran giggling loudly with friends through the temporary dining hall after the service wearing green plastic Shrek ears on his head. I had a few meatballs, some tortellini/salami salad, and a fat Schnuck’s chocolate cookie.
Carrie was reading loads of funny St. Louis-isms, originations [like crab rangoon – who knew] jingles, pronunciations, etc., some almost stupidly inappropriate, from generations past, and dumb year book verses like…
Roses are wilted,
Violets are dead,
Sugar is lumpy,
And so is your head.
Jaya was busy with musical related activities in the afternoon. Linnea claimed to feel unwell due, perhaps, to some eight-day expired milk the previous evening. And the rest of us drove out to Kirkwood, the stomping grounds of Dad’s younger youth where he walked a few miles from school to home every afternoon as a Kindergartner, stopping for candies at the fuel station on the way.
Cecil Whittaker’s thin crust.
Shelley Duvall’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; it’s usually a two-time-per-season viewing.
Joe and Rose were meeting up with Thunderbird and Annamaria. They were all peas of the same pod.
Puck was sitting on the couch in the process of transferring from church clothes to space footies. He was examining the bottom of his now sockless foot and talking to himself…
“Hmm… some ‘ingreetients’ to make stink.”
An evil grin spread across his toothless face. I could see his almost daily comedy routine being prepared…
“Dad, smell the ingreetients of my feet.”
He thrust one foot above Bær’s beard. Bær had to agree that the stink was, indeed, odorous. Carrie has, on occasion, claimed that the constitution of his feet already resembles that of a seventeen year-old boy.
“Oh, Mom, you haven’t smelled the ingreetients yet today either,” his accent became something of a French-Russian studio chef. “To-day… To-day…”
He paused and pulled his toes to his nose.
“Wait, wait. I have to smell it to make sure it’s perfumed.”