The Feed
Puck eyeballed his oatmeal skeptically, as usual.
“Mom? Know why I don’t want to eat this?” he pointed at the corner patch of gruel. “Swamp heaven.”
He ate it anyway.
Puck stuffed his lips with happy yellow-orange peach wedges to make juicy grins in the hand mirror.
“Mom, doesn’t my chin look like a brain when I do this?”
He snarled up his chin skin in a fine wrinkle with his scariest face, which did, indeed, look like a brain. Or an elbow.
“Mom?” Puck said, on the way to Quiet Hour. “I need to remodel my room like Nana did.”
“Ok…”
“I’m going to need this,” he continued, strapping on old chemistry goggles. “I’m going to go tear down the walls now.”
“No, Puck, you can’t tear up the wall…”
“Aw.”
Of course at noon, I followed the game in D.C. If I’m absolutely honest, I wasn’t even aware until this year that the nation’s capital owned a baseball team at all. But there they were, somewhere between the discolored marble spike in the earth and Dorothy’s ruby slippers, playing their hearts out. By the time Chris Carpenter and the bullpen had delivered six shut-out innings, Puck and I were back out in cold sunshine…
“Who’s that red bird up in the tree?” Tasha asked Puck, walking to her mailbox.
“It’s me, Puck!” he grinned back at her. “Watch this trick!”
He climbed a branch higher.
“Wow. You be careful up there, now.”
“I will! How is your mother?”
I had been tagged in to watch kids again at church that night, after a respite of a convenient six months. I can just see that straggling runner out about two hours, exhaustively waving the bright red baton towards me…
“Can’t… go… on… much… longer…! Too… much… goldfish cracker… screaming… children… Hurry…! Take it…!”
Fortunately, I was at least assigned to the 3-5 department. I say “fortunately” because often, children in this age category run you down so quickly and with such aerobatic distractions, that two hours snaps in a wink. Kids are great and all. I’m just not so creative in entertaining them.
“Ok, kids, who needs a lap?”
I snapped back into it for a moment. Fourteen off-the-wall young souls settling onto floor mats for “story time”.
“A lap?”
I may be taller and wider than all these specimens, but I know like I know sugar, that half these kids would cut the circulation out of my legs in under thirty seconds. Fortunately, I survived the next twenty minutes without serving as a host body. After a splitting half hour of yelling kids rocketing paper airplanes off the double staircase in the foyer, I was ready to reward myself with a Tippin’s chocolate crème pie, to share with The Bear, obviously.
Which I did.
Without remorse.
At least for now…