Three Days Isn't Early Enough

Puck watched Crackers carefully sniff the smorgasbord lined up on the linoleum. He was beginning to lose his patience with her pickiness. “What do you pick, Crackers? McDonald’s? The meat bone. Or the meat … that you can eat. Pick now, else or you do not get a snack for breakfast.”

Crackers was intrigued by the tiny empty red and yellow French fry sleeve.

“Do you pick the McDonald’s, Crackers? Good. You will have a kitty treat. For good behav-yah [behavior].”

He turned around and joined me over his breakfast pork steak. Halfway through our reading in Leviticus, he interrupted with an important question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“Wait until we’re finished, Puck.” I concluded the reading. “Why did the chicken cross the road? I don’t know.”

Puck stared at me. “To get to the other side. That’s the proplierest joke in the world. You should have known.” He began to saw a Red Delicious in half with a blunt dinner knife.

“Watch that,” Bær advised. “You’re going to cut yourself.”

“No, I won’t,” Puck answered confidently. “I’m skilled at this.”

In front of him sat a chicken nugget box devoid of chicken nuggets. These absent nuggets had been replaced with a browning banana peel. “I’m going to give this to Fran as a joke,” Puck grinned.

When he sneezed with potentially his first cold of the season during breakfast, he reasoned, “Maybe I’m allergic to people.”

This was a promising morning.

Watermelon SpongeBob bubble bath. That was the only “boy option” available at Target. Puck settled for it.

The first snowflakes falling, we hit the next store, already way too packed for the Monday before Thanksgiving, a kid in his late teens/early twenties hurried past in shorts and a hoodie carrying a ring box…

“Hey, uh, keep your kid close,” he told me. “There’s a guy up there by the door. He’s kind of crazy.”

Puck stared at the man sitting by the front door beside his cart, part of his rather large stomach exposed to the wind. I pulled back his pointing finger and we took the entrance by the vending machines and arcade instead. Just in case. Although when Puck asked me later why he was crazy and what he might do to bother us, I didn’t really have an answer for him.

Puck’s Blog: Day #4

Well we bought some shampoo… and there was a lot to do. There was nothing to do. There was a lot to do that day. There was nothing to do that day. Knock knock. Who’s there? Strawberry… Strawberry who? Strawberry strawberry strawberry!