Oh, Puck
“Mom, what does the F word mean?”
Out of left field.
“Well, hon, I’m going to have to talk to Dad and see if you’re ready to talk about that.”
“Doesn’t it mean ‘federal offense’ and ‘violence’? And poop?”
I looked over at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.
“No… you’re probably thinking of a different word you’re not supposed to use.”
“You mean the C word?”
“No… What do you think the C word is?”
“Crap. Papa said that the other day.”
This all happened while we were getting ready to walk out the door to church.
Mom was still in Germany. Irish was still in Michigan. Carrie-Bri set out all homemade clam chowder, rolls, and salad for lunch, with salted caramel shortbread for dessert. Then while Oxbear took the boys to the movies – Japanese claymation – I stayed behind to catch the game on television with Carrie and Rose. Occasionally Francis – taking a break from working on the basement window wells – walked through to observe an at-bat or two, just like Dad used to do. So did Elmer, when he and Jaya returned from a picnic at Klondike Park. But usually these episodes end in the sisters explaining to the brothers how baseball actually works. Somehow the gene soup got a little mixed up in the Snicketts family.
“YEAH! YEAH!” Elmer exclaimed as Piscotty hit a sac fly in the bottom of the 8th. “Get all the points! Touchdown and score! YEAH!”
Or something ridiculous like that.
Back at the Silverspoon’s where I coached Puck through a tricky page of geography definitions and Oxbear made paninis for dinner, and Yali ran around in a pink collared shirt screaming bloody murder for no reason at all most of the time…
An hour later as we got the boys ready for bed, Oxbear noticed that I had developed some decent arm muscle from carrying around a 30-pound three year-old who will often “koala” himself to me throughout the day.
“Check out your mom’s muscles, Puck. She could be on the cover of a sports magazine.”
“Let me see,” Puck said skeptically; then he smiled. “That’s just flubber. Allllllll flubber.”