Man Plans His Way
It was after seven o’clock on a Sunday morning and I was wrapped up in my fuzzy blue birthday blanket on the couch, trying to cure a throbbing headache I’d had all night with an Advil. The boys were already in the kitchen spelling trouble.
“MOM!” Puck bellowed. “YALI JUST THREW A FORK ACROSS THE KITCHEN!”
“Okay… Okay, put him in the corner.”
“Yali! Yali! Corner! Get in the corner! Okay? Yali! Yali! Are you sorry for what you did? Okay, okay. Go on and play. … Mom? How do you spell ‘bored’?”
Brief, yet effective.
Later, Puck showed me the cover of his blue Mead notebook. It read:
“when You’re bord or mad or happy write numbers in this noteBook and I’m talking to You Buddy!”
Puck happily accepted his own advice when he flipped to the first page of that notebook during the worship service a couple of hours later, despite the happy distraction of two cousins sitting in the same row.
Then it came up out of nowhere; no warning at all. I found myself scrubbing the carpet at church at about eleven-fifteen that morning after Puck’s body decided to send stomach flu all over the floor. I could hear our pastor preaching from down the hallway as I raked disinfectant into the dark carpet while one of the deacons hunted up more paper towels and a vacuum cleaner. I guess there had been a little warning a few minutes earlier…
Puck clutched at his stomach, lying flat on his back in the conference room. “Oh! The pain is real!”
Turns out he was right. The whole drive home he just tried to hold it together while Yali repeatedly whacked himself in the head with a copy of Garfield.
However, three hours later – when Puck’s stomach had finally stopped connecting power to the elevator every fifteen minutes – he was again a more comfortable fellow, begging for more water than I could allow, and immersed in the world of iPad.
For what it was worth, I later learned from Carrie-Bri that apparently about a week ago Puck had “confided with her” that he planned to get the flu the day before school so he’d have an extra day in bed for Minecraft. Well done, my son. Well done. That is some kind of talent.