The Young Prince

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

The silhouette of my pajamaed son ran down the hall into our room, brandishing his foam baseball bat.

“I thought someone was burglaring our house! I thought maybe he was trying to steal all the cups. But I waited a little bit before I came out to see if he was gone and I brought my bat. But this is a hard bat. The inside’s plastic. So I probably shouldn’t hit him in the face or it would give him a surgery.”

“Son,” Bær didn’t even move. “Go back to bed for a little while.”

“Why? The sun’s rised.”

And when Bær read a short devotion to Puck before leaving that morning, explaining the concept of Faith …

“So when the disciples asked Jesus to ‘increase our faith’, they were asking Him to help them believe.”

Puck asked, “Shouldn’t they have said please?”

“Son, you’re not allowed to get up from your chair until the meal is over. You know that.”

I was washing dishes. Puck sat in Bær’s chair instead of his own.

“I just switched seats!” he protested honestly. “And, I finished my breakfast. So: force field!”

I didn’t inquire further, but mostly because I was too busy.

When Puck finished Spelling, and examined the red and black permanent marker stains on the table from previous incidental weeks, he lamented their presence.

“Yeah, those won’t come off,” I agreed.

“Well, it won’t be there forever, because the Earth will burn up. From Adam and Eve’s sin. Remember?”

I didn’t review Original Sin at that moment: laundry and lunch were waiting.

Then he slapped one of the good fabric band-aids on a sweet potato in the produce table bowl.

“Why, son?”

“It looked like it was bleeding so I put a band-aid on the potato.”

About twenty minutes later after we put Crackers downstairs during lunch so she wouldn’t beg for lunch scraps, Puck did some talking to the closed basement door, explaining why she had been put down there. Then he turned to me.

“She might understand people words. You never know. Too bad scientists haven’t figured that out yet.”

Puck celebrated the end of another school day by picking icicles off the climbing roses and storing them in the stroller. And while the pork steaks and sweet potatoes cooked for dinner, he joined the neighbor kids outside.

He had a few last words before falling asleep, still rosy cheeked from running in the cold. “I feel as sleepy as a bird … ‘burling’ in from South Africa.”