Visit from Judah
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The morning started with Puck, as usual.
“Mama, my stomach is growling for food,” he half-whispered to her.
He returned shortly later with his peanut butter-honey canoe and proudly showed his daddy.
Then, while OLeif was in the shower…
“Daddy! Do you want some bathtub toys?”
And at breakfast, when the banana accidentally brushed up against his arm…
“Mama! You stained me!”
Before Mom and the kids arrived, Puck was busy dragging OLeif’s tie around the house.
“Daddy’s bow tie. Sparkles in the sun. I put some lemonade on it,” Puck story-told himself.
During tutoring…
Francis and Mom told about Rose that morning…
“Francis had gone over to the Plum’s to pick her up in the go-cart because she had stayed the night watching the Hansel and Gretyl,” Mom was saying. “And I saw them coming back up the road, and she was all huddled up against the cold. And I was thinking, ‘She’s going to fall out of that thing.’ And sure enough, Francis started spinning around on the ice, and… out she went! She was laughing so hard…”
Francis filled in the details later about her face-plant in the snow, all sprawled out with her glasses fogged up from the cold.
“I couldn’t hold onto the go-cart because it would mess up Carrie’s white coat,” she explained later.
In the afternoon, Puck saw Collette’s make-up brush in the cabinet.
“I want that brush, Mama,” he said.
“You can’t have that, buddy.”
“But it’s a fuzzy brush.”
As if that made everything perfectly alright…
And when Collette explained later that she was going to be in a ship on the ocean in January, Puck spontaneously burst into tears.
“I don’t want you to go!” he cried.
“I’ll only be gone for eight days, bud,” she tried to explain.
“I want to come with you to the ocean!” he sobbed.
After dinner, in which Puck had eaten his fill of plain yoghurt and blueberries… OLeif returned. Immediately, they began a running in circles circus.
“Try to catch me, Daddy!” Puck squealed happily. “Try to catch me!”
Judah was to come over that night. So OLeif picked up Trader Joe’s and Digiorno pizza on the way home, what had been top-rated, according to Dad, according to Consumer Reports.
Judah arrived at seven.
Out came the cheese pizza, black truffle flatbread, crackers and brie, sparkling blueberry juice, and wine. And peppermint Joe-Joe’s. For Collette anyway… her endless vice…
It was a quiet evening, altogether. And conversation similar to those old days. Funny stories. Talk of Ethiopia and the language Judah and Evangeline were to learn: Amharic. Painting eyeballs for a living. The television series: Sing Off. Proposals by offer of camels…
“How many proposals have you had?” OLeif asked Judah.
Judah thought for a moment about that.
“You mean people wanting to marry me, or actually getting down on one knee and asking me to marry them?”
The wine must have been kicking in at that point…
And later when the matter of fire was somehow mentioned…
“Which of the kids in your family are not fascinated with fire?” Judah asked.
The evening came to a close at 10:30.