The Usual Clutter

Friday, October 12, 2007

Friday – it was the calm before the storm. A good calm anyway.

Candy pumpkins. Grandma Combs was coming over to the house (where she would spend the night and attend the autism walk early the next morning as a volunteer with Carrie), where Collette and Puck had already arrived. Frances was doing decently well in his math, probably because he had plans to play with Creole later that afternoon and wanted to finish as quickly as possible.

“I made a smoke bomb for the neighbors,” he said, coming in from outdoors.

He grinned evilly.

“I’m sure you did,” Collette said.

She looked out the window to see if he had set it off yet. Apparently he hadn’t. No smoke.

Puck was looking like a gnome with the hood of his sweater drawn up over his head. Carrie-Bri and Rose were around long enough to toss him around a bit and squish his chubby cheeks before leaving for work.

Rose stomped into the kitchen, dressed for work.

“Look, I polished my shoes,” she pointed to them. “I spilled salad dressing on them at work.”

As she said this, Carrie, who was already rushed because they were late, stormed through the kitchen.

“Aw, man! Where’s my tea? My tea!” She bellowed. “Someone took my tea!”

After a quick browse through the pantry where the tea was nowhere to be seen, they left with Carrie in a bit of a huff without the tea. First the cider, then the tea. Woe was Carrie-Bri.

Puck continued to giggle away the day. In the afternoon, Grandma arrived and brought him a felt jack-o-lantern candy bag in preparation for his first Halloween. There were also boxes of candies and snacks for the same holiday, treats for Trooper (who was always ecstatic to see Grandma), and other things. Treats included (not for Trooper): Fiddle Faddle and Sour Straws, cake, etc. (OLeif ate almost all of Collette’s Sour Straws.)

Trooper, who was constantly getting into trouble for everything and thought he was still a puppy, tried to eat a stuffed black cat throughout the entire day. Mom always caught him just in time.

Frances was only minorly distracted from his math with a cup of milk and a bag of pretzels, going into the early afternoon. Of course the larger distraction was the pretzel war between himself and Linnea. Trooper ate the shells, and Collette soon put an end to the missiles.

“I win!”

Frances threw up both arms in victory as he nailed Linnea in the back. Linnea scowled at him and skipped outside, pleased that she was done with school for the day and that Frances was not.

“Frances, back to work. What’s the formula for the area of a circle?”

“Your mom’s the area of a circle,” said Joe, who had just come into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal.

Frances giggled loudly.

“Frances?”

“Uh…”

“Are you paying attention, Frances? What about the circumference of a circle?”

Frances tried to keep himself from snickering.

“It’s 2лR.”

“Your mom’s 2лR.”

And Collette knew it would take awhile before Frances would be able to concentrate once again.

After the math session had ended, Frances was seen coating sticks in hairspray outside. Collette thought that maybe he was preparing a more flammable smoke bomb. Who could say? The mind of Frances the Soldier was always ticking with new and better improved combat ideas. Perhaps they would one day be adopted by the United States military.

Perhaps not the hair-sprayed sticks.

Later that afternoon, while Collette dropped off Frances at a friend’s house, Grandma, Mom, and Puck sat around the chiminea in the backyard.

Frances was covered head to toe in army gear and all things camouflage. Everything except for his white basketball shoes. He had mad plans for air-softing with Creole and another friend and he couldn’t enter combat without his entire entourage attached to his uniform.

On the way home, Collette found her trail of thoughts veering in the usual unpredictable directions: watching a black bug cross the road in her rear view mirror to see if it probably made it across before the next car came past, the building on the old highway that she had for awhile secretly believed housed “The Office” staff, wondering what it would be like to live in Lhasa – a Christian in an ancient Buddhist city in the middle of nowhere, the glades of grass and trees and piles of sticks and branches infused with bundles of tiny white flowers and moss along the road still untouched by pavement or buildings, realizing that those patches of ground had likely been unclaimed by anything constructed by man since the beginning of time, deciding to one evening in the near future drive over to Borders and reading through all their Gnostic gospels one evening, keeping up to date…

It was a typical train of thought.

Before Puck’s dinner that evening, he and Collette took their traditional walk around the block. After crossing the street, Collette heard the familiar whoosh of flame and looked up where another great balloon sat in the sky.

“Look, Puck!”

Collette pointed, and Puck looked. He smiled at the colorful ball above his head and would have grabbed at it for a bite, if given the chance.

Before the evening was over, there was a knock at the door, and Mollie came in. She had some time to kill before picking up her friend from a restaurant where he was mixing salads for the evening for some extra cash. After OLeif prepared a chicken barbecue pizza, they chatted while Collette watched clips from an old bizarre Romeo and Juliet. She went to bed with the effects of several days of aches and pains in her joints and neck. Something was coming on.