Rescued
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Collette dragged open her eyes at 5:50 to see OLeif flash-lighting through the room, piecing together his day. He was preaching that afternoon.
“Do I look ok?” he whispered.
Collette laughed into the pillow – checkery-plaid black, maroon, and white collared shirt with paisley tie. OLeif made amendments.
During breakfast, Puck loaded up on bananas, yogurt, toast, and ideas about the south…
“There’s no cars in Texas! That’s not true! There’s only carriages.”
“Well, actually, they do have cars in Texas…”
“In Texas? No way!”
Another walk around that crumby little neighborhood – a handful of cracker boxes built in the 60’s. The sun was fresh. Flocks of frothy fuzz, white seeds spilling out of the sky from some unknown leafy specimen. Puck, eager to continuing his doctoring skills, strapped on his doctor pack into his green-black backpack and skirted the neighborhood looking for sick people in trouble.
“I’m going to miss you tomorrow, bud,” Collette told Puck at lunch.
“Why?”
“Because I have to go to jury duty and sit in a room and decide if someone did something bad or not.”
“Well, I will get you out of there, Mama. You don’t have to go.”
“Sorry, bud. But if I don’t go, they’ll put me in jail.”
Ironically.
“Well, then,” Puck declared. “I will call the police!”
Puck spent a large part of the afternoon tossing his stuffed sheep back and forth on the porch with Collette…
“Do you think it’s a boy sheep or a girl?” Collette asked him.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Check the eyebrows.”
…and riding his shiny Strider down the driveway from “the top crack”.
Meanwhile, OLeif preached his second and last sermon of the semester at 3:30 during the final class of the spring.
Just before four, Joe texted his safe arrival, enveloped in paper work.
At five o’clock, Collette placed a call to the St. Charles Courthouse to see about the status of jury duty the following morning. Her requested waiver given her status as primary caregiver/home schooling parent had been denied, because apparently there were “too many of them”.
Mongrels.
And yet the verdict came in…
Trial canceled.
Yes.
OLeif crawled up the drive at 5:30 – home stretch.
And a mini eyeglass kit – magnifying glass and tooling… tool for Puck, a freebie from someplace, which Puck immediately added to his doctor’s kit.
“Mama doesn’t have judy duty!” Puck announced loudly to OLeif.
…who was then administered the first official doctor’s appointment at the hand of Puck. This included a temperature reading, teeth cleaning, nose “sucking”…
“Let’s open this and see what we got right here.”
…and complimentary hair brushing.
And when the Puckster had been tucked in, Collette evaluated OLeif’s sermon on DVD.