Renewed Addition
The lunch room was a little busier this morning. Chick-Fil-A Day must be the most popular lunch order of all time. Over one hundred children eager to devour packs of hot chicken nuggets. And they did, with gusto. Even Puck got a pack which beat out a boring old peanut butter sandwich any day of the week.
Post Office.
Lunch hour.
I was surprised that I barely had to wait a full minute before my number was called. Three boxes and five packages of my book ready to ship. Except for one address to rural Michigan that the post office computer couldn’t quite make out.
Puck and I tossed one of those highly bounce-able fat rubber Old Navy balls up and down the driveway before dinner, the game crackling from my phone propped above the rear windshield wiper of the Fit. Multi-tasking.
After dinner, Charter showed up. Oxbear’s gift to me for baseball season: cable television. We had lived so long with nothing but blizzard fuzz on the screen in the basement – three years or so – that I hardly thought about television anymore. But now – games, games, games.
“Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?” I asked before he shook hands on the deal.
His response was basically, in not so many words, “I trust you.”
Moderation.
Meanwhile, Puck was climbing our scraggly little front yard excuse of a tree with three of the neighbor girls. Earlier I had caught him running up the street towards the sewer.
“Stay where I can see you, Puck!” I shouted down to him.
“Why can’t I go down the manhole?” he asked.
Boys. Fortunately, when Oxbear joined us, Puck had become more interested in dismantling the wooden pallet from my book delivery. I looked out the window to see Oxbear, Puck, and three girls hammering away. They made fast work of that pallet; it didn’t even have a chance.
Later, after the Charter kid had departed, Oxbear called a two-minute family meeting in the basement.
“Now, we haven’t had TV in a long time, so: [Rule 1, Rule 2, Rule 3].”
“It’s okay. I’m just watching it for baseball.”
Puck, who could barely remember what it was like to have television, was clearly unaffected either way. I think we’re good to go.