You Can be Like Me

It was about 5:30. Dark. Blue Christmas lights glowing from the roof. Oxbear, swamped in late meetings till after nine, checked in a few times from his phone. Eventually I texted him.

“I’m trying to decide if I should be bad and take the boys to Walgreen’s for snacks.”

His reply was what I expected, word for word. “Do it.”

So we got in the car and drove around the corner, because it was too cold and too dark to walk.

“We’ll have to be careful in the summer,” I told Puck, “when it’s easy to just walk over there when it’s warm and light. Otherwise we’ll get fat on Hershey’s chocolate bars.”

I let each of the boys pick a snack. Puck walked the aisles, Yali running right next to him to keep up. Finally, Puck selected a small bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. So what did Yali pick?

“Buddy, why don’t you find your own snack,” Puck suggested. “Get your own thing.”

He led Yali back to the rack of chips – or “pops” as Yali calls them – to make a different selection. But after thinking about it for a moment, he changed his mind.

“No, it’s okay, Yali. You can have those chips. You can be like me. Let’s go, buddy.”