Rain

Yali and I sat together on the stoop just outside school. It was about nine o’clock in the morning and the skies were sad. We watched silver rain pour over the parking lot and playground, light split the sky. We stayed there until Yali thought it would be so much more fun to walk out into it. Then we left for chapel.

It poured so hard on the way back to the Silverspoon’s, we could hardly see the road.

Before we left for school that afternoon, the sun had momentarily returned. But Yali’s mood didn’t match it. He let loose with some kind of temper tantrum, all about the big fuzzy blue blanket. I’m not even sure what he wanted me to do with it. But whatever it was, I certainly wasn’t doing it right, and he was not happy about it. Once the wailing had gradually morphed into sing-humming, I knew the crisis had passed, and he had successfully distracted himself from the tragedy of the moment.

Seven o’clock that night we were out in Ballwin for Heidi’s volleyball game.

“Now, Puck,” I warned him as we drove through another light rainstorm, “I just want you to prepare yourself, in case they don’t have bleachers at this school. I know you’ll be disappointed, but remember – the biggest reason we’re going to this is to watch Heidi play volleyball. Not to dumpster dive.”

Puck got a big grin on his face. “Oh. They’ll have bleachers,” he assured me.

They did.

Halfway through three sets of volleyball, the small gym was growing louder and louder with cheering and whistling as Heidi’s team kept winning. Puck shared equal time between yelling about the match-up on the scoreboard and ring-leading about five little kids on the side of the bleachers with a stash of stuff he had collected prior to game start.

An hour later, Puck and I departed through more rain, splashing through rising puddles on the parking lot. He was now the proud owner of a broken plastic hangar in two pieces (which he used for a “pirate hook arm” and “bow and arrow”), a broken orange cone, several bean bags, and an old tennis ball. The loot continues to amount.

Back at the Silverspoon’s, movie night was just commencing with another ridiculous Big Crosby Bob Hope installment, this time in “The Road to Zanzibar”.