Under Cover of Darkness

Puck rummaged in the fridge for anything spare that morning. Not food, mind, but containers, anything close to being finished. Or not so much. He pulled out an unopened glass bottle of Fanta, picked up at Walgreen’s on the way into the city Saturday night:

“Can I have this when you finish it, Mom?”

“Why this time, Puck?”

“Because I love bottles. You can actually recycle them if you have the heart to do it.”

About two hours later, he had convinced me to sew up two new suits for Donkey and Buck: Cardinals shirts for the start of the season. So while Puck wrote beach-themed sentences in his notebook at the kitchen table, I soon found myself chain stitching the St. Louis emblem on a rectangle of recycled Kennebunkport, ME t-shirt that Puck had been loathe for me to mutilate:

“Son, I got this shirt ten years ago. The whole side is ripping open. It’s okay to use it for something else now.”

Still, his eyes were brimming. The kid doesn’t like change. Two guesses where he gets that from.

Puck walked out 3/4th of the way through Quiet Hour:

“Do you have a spare white shirt so I can draw a cheeseburger on it and give it to Fran?”

I didn’t:

“That’s okay, Mom. I’ll draw one on one of my undershirts.”

Five minutes later: a big old fat guacamole burger judging by his imaginative use of shape and color.

We were now t-minus 11 days to launch. Four sisters and a mom found themselves at T.J. Maxx at eight o’clock on a cold Monday night (stomaches full of Joe’s and Jaya’s mini chocolate-filled desert pastries), ice melt sparkling on the sidewalks like amethysts. None of our wardrobes were quite capable of handling Florida, mid-March, so a little updating was required.

And then Target. Rose has this uncanny ability to describe clothing in a way that would make her high demand in New York fashion copy writing (if such a thing exists; I don’t really know):

“Wow! This sweater looks like someone ate birthday cake with sprinkles and vomited on it!”

I think we’re just about ready to go now.

Puck’s Weekly What-do-You-Want-to-be-When-You-Grow-Up Status:

“I want to be a um Scientist … no, an Artist … no a Scientist.”