Mold in Your Throat
Every morning since “The Quake of ’08”, I’ve been watching a line in the ceiling slowly descend and split near the bedroom door. Lately, a small piece of that plaster has been cracking off from this bulging fault-line, bit by bit every day. It is now dangling by a shard point. I should start taking bets on the day of its official demise.
And because the mold counts were huge, and I had forgotten to eat enough on Monday, my head and stomach were jumped-up.
“Why do you feel bad, Mama?” my sweet boy asked.
I explained.
“Oh! I will get you somethin’, Mama!” he ran from the room.
“It’s alright, buddy. I…”
“No, Mama!” he shouted back from the living room on his way to the kitchen. “I will get your breakfast! A cheese!”
He did, indeed, return with the cheese tub and a steak knife.
Oh, boy.
Anyway, when I arrived in the kitchen at an earlier hour than Monday’s awakening, Puck was already busy diagramming the effects of mold on OLeif the Bear’s throat that morning on the whiteboard.
“Dad! The mold is doing THIS! To your throat!” he slashed the board in dramatic swirls with the marker.
“So that’s what’s happening?” OLeif asked.
“Yeah! And the green is trying to stop all the red to help your body.”
“Is it working?”
“I fink [think] so… The green is about to win. The battle is about to win.”
By ten, my young charge was biking on his Strider through the house with a flat wedge of jumbo rainbow lollipop in one sticky paw, and my hand mirror in the other. I really sometimes just don’t ask… And, no, I don’t let him bike in any other kitchens. [Except sometimes Gloria’s.]
That would be rude.
I am completely spoiled; I know it. But when the Bear absolutely insists that you attend eleven games in a season, then you absolutely attend eleven games in a season.
So I did.
Am.
Tonight, the Bear came with me to view the chaps fresh up from Phoenix. I feel some connection to Phoenix, even if I only visited once. After all, Mom and Dad lived there for a year before I was born, and have good memories of grapefruit, dominoes, and melting temperatures.
– If you will recall, my mom finds something good about everything. As may have been mentioned before, this is the same woman who apologizes to the laundry in the clothes dryer if she opens the door before they’re fully dried. The same woman about whom Richard asked the Bear at church, “What does it feel like to have the nicest mother-in-law in the world?” The same lady who, as a 52 year-old grandmother, was described by Mrs. Giraffes as having “only half a wrinkle”.
This, my friends, is my mother. –
Anyway, I joined the Bear in Clayton for Game Eight, a quick Greek dinner from Trader Joe’s for the Bear [Italian cheese and salami for me], shucked the newly Colombia-fied Mazda into the five-dollar parking garage where the attendant garbled something about “Jason Motte…” to the Bear…
– “Ok, Collette. We get it already.” –
And stuffed ourselves under the arcing round of commentator’s boxes.
The city was cooled tonight. We packed in bags of pistachios, sesame sticks, and chocolate peanut butter cups as Jon Jay scrawled in his fourth homer of the season after a two-run shot by the boy from Oklahoma. And even an impressive triple for back-sore Raffy. Everything was iced off with more sparkling red explosions for a comfortable crowd of 34,000+. Not bad for a Tuesday non-promo night in mid-August, I think.
On the drive back, we were snarled in the parking garage for a few minutes while Rose texted me about the tea-cup pig she had seen on her walk in the park that evening.
And the Bear tried to teach me how to roll my R’s. One more reason why ingesting español is going to take some… creative thinking.