Two Lives
I picked up what looked like an ancient bone out of the dirt. What I couldn’t identify at first, walking through a forested and mountainous national park, later turned out to be a practically petrified human tailbone. As I kept walking, I discovered its origin. The rest of its skeleton was slowly slipping out of the hillside due to a moderate case of erosion. The bones of an old saint. While Oxbear shoveled more earth on top of the desecrated burial site – Crusader-like stone marker halfway intact – I kept walking up the hill with Irish to the ranger station, which was also a hugely modified Westminster. By the time I got there, it was night. Irish had gone off someplace else. And there was basketball practice going on in the gym. That’s when I realized my 6:15 alarm was going off.
A few minutes later while trying to get “Low in the Grave He Lay” unstuck from my head – residual from Easter morning – I heard Yali start to cry from the boys’ room, followed by an annoyed older brother commanding him, “Don’t! Even! Think about it!”
The fussing immediately stopped and both boys were soon off playing in the other room.
A couple of hours later we were at the hospital waiting for Yali’s first speech evaluation. Mr. Potato Head helped make it feel more like a playdate than an appointment. Puck also pulled up a chair next to his brother, to add his professional opinion from time to time.
“He’s very greedy,” he told the speech therapist in full seriousness, as if that fully explained why Yali was currently incapable of saying his “b”s and “p”s.
Later that afternoon while I sorted through Yali’s doctor’s phone calls and speech therapy papers, I could hear the two of them horsing around in the basement. Clearly Puck had elicited Yali’s help in clearing out the litter box. Again.
“Hold the bag, Yali! Hold it! Hold it! … Hold the bag open! OPEN!”
Half an hour later as I folded another load of endless laundry, I caught them fishing in the air vents for treasure. That was before they started raiding the Easter chocolate which I thought I had completely removed.
Eventually, to prevent further rummaging, I took them on a walk around our little dilapidated 1960s neighborhood – blue sky, warm breezes. Puck jousted the air with a foam sword on his bike, hunting bits of stray garbage from Monday’s trash collection for confiscation, passing neighborhood kids greeting each other in Spanish.