Only Four Senses
Landing a large plane on a runway strewn with garbage and fires at dusk. Maybe some tropic island turned cold. When I woke up, thinking I must have overslept, it was 6:01 in the morning.
The problem with leftover movie night snacks is that I sometimes forget to hide them before the boys wake up. Fortunately they weren’t discovered until I had entered the kitchen to stall trouble. Already the gleam of greed lit up Yali’s little black eyes as he saw a box of Cheez-It Grooves on the counter.
“Oh! Wow!” he said, delighted with his discovery.
“Where are all those sodas?” Puck asked, his head stuck in the fridge.
Sometime later while Oxbear was mowing the lawn and burning sticks in the backyard, and I was marinating his lunch salmon in honey and salt (a little trick learned from the traveling musician brother-in-law in Nashville), I heard Puck tie a rope to his bunk bed and climb out his bedroom window. Fortunately our house is only one story. He was pretty pleased with this trick. Also fortunately, I caught Yali before he tried to do the same.
A few minutes later, Puck had tied that rope to a hand mirror which he strung through the old shade hooks in the living room window. Yali watched, fascinated.
“Hmm… And what is the purpose of this?” I asked him.
Puck shrugged and grinned. “I don’t know.”
Some minutes later…
“Puck, what are you doing in the microwave?”
“Looking for my birthday presents.”
While I put lunch together, I let the boys watch some Garfield in our bedroom. A loud cry brought me back to learn that Yali had decided to dive headfirst into his big brother’s head, dribbling blood over my bedspread. So while I doctored the busted lip, lunch burned on the stove. One day, one day I may learn how to smell again. Or at least better than “I can’t recognize when something’s burning on the stove”.
I guess it was sometime around three o’clock when we finally drove over to the Silverspoon house for enchiladas and homemade guacamole. Ansel was out at Charlie’s bachelor party – I remember when that guy was a dinky little kid about Puck’s age in the home school choir – and could not participate. I don’t think Theodore or Oxbear regretted the opportunity for extra portions. Oxbear waxed a little sentimental over the good old days growing up on Mexican food in Texas. Unfortunately for him, he married a St. Louis girl raised on German Midwest cooking. There’s got to be some happy medium between the two. Maybe when I learn how to smell, I’ll figure that one out…