Too Cool for the Olympics

My morning started off poorly. Puck ran out to get me from packing up the car for Sunday adventures. “Mom! Come quick. I don’t think you’re going to be happy with what Crackers did to your plant.” I was not. Mutilated bonsai, my gift from Rose. The shoot that had grown so well, popped up over a week early. One seed out of nine: success. Two little maple leaves curling up to the sunshine. Dead. Butchered. Sometimes I don’t like cats.

“MOM! MOM! I GOT FOUR PIECES OF CHOCOLATE AND CANDY AT SUNDAY SCHOOL!!! Well, not four. That wrapper is from my friend’s chocolate.”

I didn’t ask if the red sucker in his mouth counted as number four or not.

Puck, Irish, and I picked up El Oso from another Presbyterian church across town where he had fiddled for two of their services. We had a small mission for the early afternoon: Busch Stadium team store. Carrie had her eye on this sparkly ball cap that had finally come out in stores. We all wear our Cardinals gear in our own way around here. So Irish and I walked around a quiet store, the only customers in fact, and found a hat for Irish too. Getting ready for the season. And while we walked around, the boys picked up Jimmy John’s.

Mom and Dad returned from dancing lessons, Mom saying something about mastering the rhumba. Dad set a bag of homemade gingersnaps on the coffee table to share, wearing his new birthday MIZZOU sweatshirt.

“We have a little something for you, Carrie,” Mom told her later, as I got the new hat from Puck’s backpack. “And it’s name begins with D.F.,” someone added. Well, she got her David Freese jersey from Irish anyway, so she’s good to go, in style.

Then Dad started burning cardboard boxes in the wood stove, countless cardboard boxes. It got ridiculously hot, the roar of a rocket engine from the flames. Joe and Jaya were gone addressing wedding invitations and watching wedding movies, apparently. Rose was half-asleep on the couch hugging my laptop. She wasn’t the only one. El Oso had conked on one couch, Francis on the other before joining Creole and Gaston at Dairy Queen, mumbling about making Carrie and Rose “buttered noodles” for lunch. “They tasted like playdough,” Carrie laughed. “He put so much salt on them.” Francis salts everything that goes into his stomach. Anyway, the afternoon got going with Olympics, which hardly anyone actually wanted to watch, the girls laughing about endless rumps packed too tightly into spandex of many colors and natures – “Gaaaah!” – until Carrie just couldn’t take it anymore. “Alright, we’re watching Louis Hayward. And I’m warning you all, I’m grumpy. I’m only watching this to hear his golden voice. So no talking!” Maybe it was a combination of the Olympics, missing out on the Pizza Hut combo boxes that night, and losing David Freese to spring training with the Cactus League next week, but I think the crackling black and white episode helped. Figure skating resumed on the basement television.