The Incident
Saturday, September 4, 2010
The after-birthday-math.
Puck began his morning with some sweet chubby cheeks.
“I will never leave you, Mama,” he said with a grin.
Over at the Silverspoon’s: the grill was pumping out chicken, baked potatoes, and baked beans.
Come two o’clock, OLeif dropped off Collette at the house to join Rose and Carrie-Bri for an afternoon and evening downtown.
Things hadn’t worked out exactly as planned… They had intended to see The Mourners — tomb sculptures from the court of Burgundy — but there was not a single empty parking spot in the entire park, but for the far corner lot which was where ‘all the murders happened’, as the girls put it. And too far away to walk to the museum with the time they had. They saw three or four weddings in process, and half a thousand out-of-state license plates packed around the Zoo… So they parked in the lot near the pond ‘where they dumped all the bodies’, as Carrie put it, and hiked through a six foot-high field garden of yellow daises which smelled of prehistoric mint. And then they sat by a smaller pond with cascading water and stirred the water and green rose-shaped water plants with reeds. Then back to the car to pass around Rose’s orange-sapphire hand sanitizer… just in case…
At church, Collette saw Hamlet’s wife come in and sit in the first row. And the gentleman sitting next to Collette, footballer-sized (American football), dreadlocks halfway down his back, in his thirties, walked with a cane, found it necessary to sing in an operatic voice so loud, that Collette had difficulty keeping a smile off of her face during the service.
Afterwards, they dropped off Carrie by the fountains where she would meet Lucia and Grewe for a night on the town.
World Market. It was one of the few places Collette, and Rose, could go a little crazy if they allowed themselves. Rose immediately shot herself over to the shelves of Hallowe’en where there were boxes of soft straw owls, sparkling black cat-face buckets (Rose got one of those for Mom), purple and orange glass votives embossed with black velvet silhouettes (she had her eye on one of each of those for awhile), etc., etc. Then there was a bag of real black licorice for Dad, a package of spicy Asian rice crackers and wasabi peas for OLeif (which he didn’t seem to like very much…) a pack of ginger beer and a package of digestive biscuits for Carrie, and a package of assorted European cookies for the kids.
It was while they were in World Market that Collette heard the disturbing news from OLeif that Theodore had cut off the top of his finger, all the way down to the first joint. He was at the hospital awaiting surgery at some point in the night… not an ideal sort of Saturday, to say the least…
This was followed by a Chick-fil-A pick-up and back to the house where the boys and Linnea-Irish were all three involved in an all-out dirt war in the backyard. Linnea came in coughing up a dirt cloud. She looked like Pig Pen.
Then Dad came out to collect the remains of the evening. Francis had already begged off the rest of Collette’s soda…
“Chick-fil-A!” Dad exclaimed, and started checking for last bites inside the boxes.
“You may have one fry, Dad,” Rose said, attempting generosity.
“One?”
Then he rummaged through the bag of cookies. He also discovered that there had been, not one, but five quarts of ice cream in the freezer. He also helped himself to some of that.
They followed it up with Carlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, always a crowd-pleaser.
Going on eleven, they heard that Theodore had come successfully through surgery.