You Don't Know How Big My Stomach Is

It was still in the 80s, that last day of summer. Puck, Heidi, and Yali ran around the playground, coaxing each other into attempting flips on the high bar, on their stomachs.

“Come on, Puck,” Heidi urged him. “You can do it. Just do it. COME ON!”

Puck, his gut hanging right across the yellow bar, was not so easily convinced. “You don’t know how big my stomach is,” he protested.

“You don’t know how big MY stomach,” Heidi grinned back at him.

“No. You don’t understand,” Puck sighed, inching his way off the bar. “An adult’s stomach can’t even get bigger than mine.”

Heidi did not have a prepared retort. And eventually Heidi managed to front flip around the bar, while Puck decided to wait for another day.

With all this endless dumpster diving in the school gym, Puck has found some “beauties”. Granted, no one else would really classify them as such, but he’s pretty convinced of their innate value. Wednesday, he fashioned a couple of cardboard boxes into “Thor’s hammer”. And he carried around an empty garbanzo bean can all Tuesday afternoon, which he thought was just hilarious.

On the drive back home Wednesday afternoon, Puck pondered his next project. This time, it was school-mandated.

“We have to invent our own animal that made adaptations, and make it out of boxes,” he explained to me. “I think… I’m going to make a chicken with a bear face, and it lays white eggs. … And it can fly.”

The night came faster than it should. Carrie and I recorded Episode 125 of the old baseball podcast out at the Big House that evening. No more fireflies now. Goodbye, summer.

Countdown till moving: 10 days.