The Way of Boys
CRASH!
We were about an hour into our very snowless first-ever snow day with school, and already things were happening. Turns out Puck had forgotten to give Crackers a fresh supply of water, so she found a mug on the counter, knocked it to the floor, tiny bits of ceramic all over the linoleum.
It wasn’t long after I’d cleaned that up and I realized both boys were rummaging in the kitchen vents. Hunting out valuables.
“Boys, come on, get out of there.”
Puck returned the vent covers, and held up a tiny piece of something that I wasn’t really sure what it was. Might have come from a computer, but it was small and had a sharp edge. He put it away for future use.
“Mom?” he asked me about half an hour later, “can you write down all my times tables on this card?”
I wrote down the ones he requested and handed him the card, getting back to sweeping up the kitchen.
I should have known when Puck sweetly cajoled Yali back to his room a few minutes later that something was up, but I was too busy folding laundry. Everything was suddenly very quiet. Some time later…
“Mom! Come see what I did in our room!”
Being the mom of two boys teaches you how to “not react”. When Puck brandished a hand to the inside door of his wardrobe, scratched from stem to stern with addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables, I thought about the well-intended destruction for a minute.
“Wow, bud. Well, that’s something there.”
Puck held up the sharp object he had fished out of the vent as his artist’s tool of choice. “Now I can teach Yali his times tables too! And when I learn division, I’ll add them on there too!”
Clearly, he was thrilled with his creation which he honestly believed would be very helpful to the next generation. And so I didn’t say too much about graffiti. We’ll chat about that later.
That evening I joined Mom and most of the kids out in Ladue and snow-covered lawns to visit with Dad’s old friend from high school. Cake, coffee for those who would, and stories from the old times. High school in the 70s. Back in the day I guess you could get concussions during football games and go back and finish the whole game.
“Your dad was fun to play pranks on,” Dad’s buddy told us. “He was popular, a good lookin’ guy, and great at sports. But he was shy. So he was the perfect target! But,” he added with a mischievous smile, “he wasn’t completely innocent,” and began to tell us a story about the time they cut down a tree which landed on the main road on a Sunday morning an hour before church traffic started.