Lysacek and Plushenko
Wednesday night brought gold medals for Shani Davis in short track, Lindsey Vonn in downhill skiing, and the Flying Tomato, Shaun White, in the Half-Pipe, which was pretty amazing.
At breakfast Thursday morning, Collette asked Puck if he had dreamed.
“I did,” he replied.
“What did you dream?”
“I dreamed about my nap!”
“Oh — that sounds like a good idea.”
“No… It’s not.”
The rest of the morning was spent practicing for a variety of three year-old encounters, including visiting the doctor and the dentist, making ‘Clam’ talk, sitting practice, learning to read words, etc., and etc. Collette’s jaw was usually excessively tired after such mornings of almost constant discussion and answering questions.
Before lunch, Puck lay down on the floor on his back and began waving his arms up and down parallel to the floor as if he were making snow angels.
“I’m making strangers, Mama!”
When Rose arrived after class, Super Pizza with the boys at work, and helping Jimmy Dean clean out the storage room, she had picked up ingredients to make a triple chocolate chip cake, which was in the oven by six o’clock.
That night, when Collette and Rose adjourned to the basement for more Olympics, Collette heard Puck calling to her from his crib:
“You take your mustache off, Mama?”
Then Collette and Rose talked about how they envisioned Russia as cement tenements, gray, and trees with no leaves. Which was, of course, entirely unfair. But that was the assumed image.
Then Joe arrived in time for Men’s Figure Skating and Women’s Half-Pipe. The power and the air.
They then imagined Francis at the Olympics as an ice skater, and how funny he would look.
“His face would be tomato red,” said Collette.
“Yeah, and Creole and Puff ‘o Lump would be on the side of the rink…” said Rose.
“Just pointing and laughing.”
“And then they’d go-cart over the ice to pick up Francis and they’d be like, ‘See ya, suckas!’”
Then, when the Japanese took the ice and took a crash off the bat, Rose was quick to respond:
“He got up quick though. Five second rule.”
The running Snicketts-Silverspoon commentary, that, combined with the hilarious Old Spice commercial re-runs… provided for an evening of lavish comedy and entertainment, which included detailed analysis between them during the last tense half hour of watching the men take the ice.
In the end, there was rarely ever anything more thrilling than another amazing Olympian night. This time with Evan Lysacek and Evgeni Plushenko bringing on a brilliant show taking the gold and silver, respectively, somewhere after eleven o’clock — the cool blue eyes of a Russian silver, and the dimpled Italian-American smile of a suddenly very young-looking gold.