Thirty-Nine
“Ha! Ha ha ha ha! Mom! I think I have to give this back to Sunday School! Ha! They gave me two red paper hearts when they thought they only gave me one! Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Aw…”
Puck’s wake-up call this morning. The kitchen was an early bomb of Carmex, honey, post-its, scotch tape, and Greek texts. Just things of life corn-rowed into the hours of necessary living. The Bear – slightly groggy – joined us some time later. About Friday he needs an extra hour to 90 minutes to catch up on what he lost earlier in the week. He holds his own. We still attribute it to king-size upgrade, of course. It was cold and still gray. A brief inspection of KSDK revealed hopeful thunderstorms for Sunday, and mostly regularly-scheduled February temperatures for the next week which was a happy note for my also-regular sinus-allergy whatever-it-is-you-get-living-near-a-Midwest-river. Puck rolled himself in the eggplant and chocolate blankets on the rug, dragging an unhappy cat with him…
“Don’t you dare try to escape from your daddy. I never get to have fun times with you anymore, like when you were a baby. I miss those times, Crackers. I wish you were a baby again.”
Growl.
“You’re going to grow up into a big cat and then I’ll have to give you away. I’m not sure if I will have to or not. I just – sigh – miss those days when you were a baby. Smashing days. Those days when we used to have fun together, when I didn’t own you yet. Those were fun times. Sigh… I just love you. Really much.”
And in celebration of Jules Verne’s 185th birthday… we… didn’t really do much of anything, actually. I didn’t have any sugar to bake a submarine-space-ship cake. And I didn’t have any of his sci-fi films available for watching. So we sort of celebrated without bells and whistles. A few sips of peppermint tea for the young chap. A little Wahoo…
“I’m going to go outside and steal that nut!”
“Wait, what?”
I stopped the determined five year-old from marching right out the front door in my wellies.
“That squirrel! He just buried a nut, and I’m going to take it!”
“No. You’re not. That’s rude.”
“Ok… Mom! That squirrel just picked up a whole loaf of leaves!”
He couldn’t contain himself for long. He had important tornado-measuring matters to attend to in the backyard. Crackers batted furiously, one paw out the slit in the patio door, to join her boy. The boy in the crackly silver cape. The stumpy remains of our unfortunate snowman still somehow held on in the mud and leaves and non-grass. Like a remnant of some Japanese spirit image. I don’t really know what I’m talking about with that one. But it seemed about right. I worked on lunch, checking on him through the window, sweeping out the shed, opening a couple of bags of metal hinges and things that I’m pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to mess with. But he was trying to be helpful… Wiggling those little blonde eyebrows up and down when he thought he had something good to talk about. Over lunch he found a pearl onion in his stew…
“Search around for these things next time, Mom! I want to keep it!”
The kid would collect anything from space rocks to water-marked Pepsi boxes, which I did actually see him haul away to the dumpster from the shed. I’m pretty certain those were never ours in the first place… Puck just can’t help himself. During Quiet Hour he retreated from the bathroom with a cake of olive oil soap…
“Mom, look! You don’t have to buy any more soap. Did you forget about this old buddy?”
He found many “old buddies” for the next hour. He also flipped on Uncle Red Strike’s music and started trying the splits.
“I need to work out now,” he said importantly, trying a few push-ups.
Then he started lifting my small rocking chair up and down, then Cracker’s condo, and my five-pound weight. Once Jon Hardy and the Public – “A Hard Year” had cycled through once, he switched it on again.
We got four of the kids over that night, including Cassidy, not long after The Bear walked in with a rotisserie chicken, cheese, and tortillas to go with the avocado. Which I forgot. We hauled down the cookies, Cheez-Its, Magnus and Cassidy carted over some beers. Joe hooked up the DVD player, because we couldn’t find ours, for “Blast from the Past”, a new one for both boys. It entertained enough. Maybe not enough to paralyze the kids from their usual thoughts that had to be shared…
“You sort of look like Abraham Lincoln,” Magnus said.
“Wait, are you talking to Rose?” Cassidy asked.
Rose wrinkled her nose.
“No, I mean The Bear,” Magnus clarified. “Yeah, Rose just pulls out her beard…”
“I didn’t realize just how hard it is to shave knees,” Magnus added later. “All the girls at the library were talking about it today.”
“Do they get any work done over there?” Cassidy asked.
Naturally, during the kissing scene, Joe and Magnus began loudly flapping their face skin by grabbing chunks of skin on both sides, leading to sounds resembling sprinting snails, or something… Rose was still tired from the week’s dose of flu, or whatever it was, but she still felt well enough to squish the cat before returning to the house for the night.