Ice Cube

Puck quietly walked into my room around 6:30 that morning. “I almost ate a cookie, Mom … so I threw the rest away.”

I thanked him for his honesty as he departed. A couple of minutes later he returned and carefully set a box of Trader Joe’s maple leaf sandwich cookies on the bed.

“I halfway ate a cookie, Mom.”

This time he left the box, although it wasn’t until later that I realized “halfway” still only meant “almost”.

El Oso rang me up as he walked into work.

“The truck is making really funny noises; it started shaking when I got here.”

Tow truck. Garage. Moolah.

Irish, the newest college kid in the family, had been up to class at 8:15, and back, surprised to find Puff ‘O Lump as a classmate, and relieved that some college algebra classes could, in fact, be easy. On the first day.

Mom and I walked out into the freezer of a late, annoyingly frigid, morning to pick up nutritional supplements off Big Bend and more Aldi groceries in the Valley. While I suited up in Carrie-Bri’s hand-me-down tomato red Sydney airport winter coat purchase, I asked Puck the question I like to ask him about once a week:

“Hey, Puck, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Uh, baseball player.”

“What position?”

“Harmonica.”

One point five hours later under fresh cold flakes in the wind, Mom and I brought back burrito fixings and five pots of shockingly rich 99-cent primroses in red, yellow, and violet.

Children shrieked with laughter down the hall during 45 minutes of red-bow-tie-sweater-vested Ray Bolger lectures on Medina and Mecca and I scrawled a note to remember to pick up the primroses, and my husband, at the Big House where he had enjoyed chicken sandwiches and “buttered noodles” at seven. This Francis-approved dinner spread deserved a “Sweet mother of Mary!” from the college freshman, which is about as close as you can get to swearing in the Snicketts household and get away with it.

A drop by the library – angry-bitter cold – completed our drive, and home where Puck claimed to be “so so tired” and therefore incapable of brushing his teeth. El Oso made tea.