Too Soon
The sun poked out sort of creepy before nine this morning, like a haunted day. The cats liked it, sun-bathing on the cool linoleum of the kitchen, while Crackers hunted – and ate – random pieces of cat-infused fuzz.
The Bear stayed late to read “The Happy Hollisters” to Puck. He likes to grab as much son-time as he can, especially with the long commute and classes forming again this month – the dreaded Greek. I guess when Puck tells me that he doesn’t want to go to the park because “it won’t be any fun without Dad”, you know the kid misses him. However, the Bear tried to convince our son to make the journey without him as he folded up two fat peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches into his bike pack.
“Ok…” Puck droned after awhile. “I guess I’ll go to the park…”
“Life is hard, isn’t it.”
I sent the somewhat disappointed kid to brush his teeth with the two-minute plastic hour glass timer from the dentist…
“Aagh! The timer fell into the loo!”
“Take it out and wash it. Wash your hands too,” the Bear called back to him.
He apparently forgot the hand towel also because…
“Eh. I got your Cardinals news a little bit wet, Mama. Sorry!”
Fortunately, I had double copies of that Game Seven headline. What he was doing around the newspapers anyway, I can’t really quite figure… Sometimes it’s best not to try.
Then he wanted us to weigh ourselves on the scale, which we did.
“We tied, Mom!” he announced, wide-eyed. “If I put my pound on top of your pound, you would weight six and a half!”
Close, buddy.
Close…
Before the Bear left, he displayed for us the original piece of painted poetry that Sunrise had added to canvas as a gift for his office. I think that’s another thing about “our church” – people who leave still come back, often, to visit and remember and keep friends. You don’t always see that anymore.
Three days at home with busywork, and it was time to get out. It was actually sort of astonishingly cool at the park, so much that after an hour and a half, I had to bring us home. The wind was almost cold after all this heat. But Puck got his fair share of roaming the metalwork with all the other children pawned off to space decks and time machines and whatever else these kids conjure on the catwalks.
The sky has been changing too. Sort of that old reminder of autumn Native American weather and clouds, like 1970’s snapshots in green and yellow. There’s a distinct flavor change, and it happened just this week.
It didn’t take Puck long to hunt up the rascals when we got back. He entered my room with one creature under each arm…
“There’s your little spider machines. You know?” he asked with a grin.
Truth be told – I have not seen a single spider in this house since the arrival of the felines.
The so-called “Quiet Hour” was interrupted by the terrorizing blast of Puck blowing the old Spanish American war bugle out his bedroom window. I wonder how many squirrels he paralyzed with that introduction…
And just to impress you with my conscientiousness of healthy living…
I prepared steamed carrots, baked chicken, and salad for dinner, sliced up peaches to pack with the almonds, walnuts, and bottled water for tomorrow’s bonanza fiasco. I would eat… two… of these items.
Then I swept up, including the carcass of a pill bug.
Poor old pill bug.
So for all this, I missed attending Elvis in concert with three generations of the family women. Missing Steve Davis – Elvis impersonator extraordinaire; I mean that – for a single summer would be, for my family, like skipping over St. Patrick’s Day corned beef and cabbage. So it just had to be done.