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We have food, and any minute now, there’ll be boys to eat it.  For some reason there’s no school today or tomorrow.  I think it might be the practice days off for when they get out for the whole week around Thanksgiving.  Does anyone know when this started happening?  I remember having Thanksgiving Thursday off and the Friday after, and that was it.  It is Thanksgiving, isn’t it, that always falls on a Thursday?  My memory for Holiday dates is not great.

I think I’ve decided there’s a Toothpaste For Dinner cartoon for just about any occasion you can think of.

I’ve somehow injured a knuckle on my ring finger, right hand, and now it’s swollen and stiff.  I can’t make a fist.  I can barely type the letter “O”, and bending downward to hit the period key is especially difficult.  How will I defend myself against the boys?  I’m worried my left-handed punch has gone to hell as I’ve gotten older, weak as a schoolgirl’s.  Oops!  The ice cream!  Melting in the car!  Maybe an ice pack for my knuckle.  Something cold, at least.  The medicinal six pack, perhaps?

Oops, no food.

The upside of foodlessness is that suddenly there’s hope of clearing out the kitchen sink.  No food, no reason to dirty more dishes.  I know!  Let’s pretend we’re kids playing outside in the summer and we’ll drink from the hose.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?

No, really, that image is all wrong.  My kitchen is clean.  Cleaner than it’s been in some time.  Clean enough to eat out even.  Things are looking up.

But the no food issue is a problem.  Boys are on the way.  Lots of them, and as everyone knows, boys need food.  Tonight is the rescheduled sleepover that came grinding to a halt a few weeks ago when our dog decided to show off by racing cars down the road.  She lost, of course, and we still miss her, but life goes on.  Boys gather for sleepovers in spite of dead dogs.  And not much stops them from eating for too long of time.

So I’ll clean a bathroom or two then race to the store to stock up for the five boy invasion.  Five boys for 24 hours.  Keifer Sutherland will play me when they make the movie of this day.  He will race around, trying to find out what has gone wrong, never expecting his own house is filled to the brim with double agents.

What we need around here is some combination toilet cleaning/boys-tear-down-the-house music!  I’m thinking CCR.  {links removed]

I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightnin’.
I see bad times today.

I hear hurricanes ablowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers over flowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

If that isn’t about a five boy sleepover, I don’t know what song is.  Even a reference to over flowing.  Toilets, of course.

from Toothpaste For Dinner

Last night’s homework meltdown wore me down, but I’m slowly picking up speed.  The whole afternoon began with a two hour battle after the boy’s frustration over some unseen circumstance culminated in him taking a poke at his mom.  That hasn’t happened in a long time, so I would say that great progress has been made, but a relapse is a relapse, so it was time to draw another parental line in the sand.  Oh how an evening can drag on when there’s tension in the air.

The thought is that the boy was caught in a lie and became desperate to cover his tracks when he thought someone was on their way to speak with his teacher.  Cornered!

We didn’t push the whole lie business, although I rode him fairly hard all last night about the book review project he was supposed to have been working on the last couple of weeks, but hadn’t, of course.  Procrastinator!  This morning I rolled him out of bed and continually applied the whip until the project was complete, making him a half an hour late for school.  Once he’d walked through the school doors it finally felt like I was breathing normal air again.

I treated myself to a haircut where something happened that is totally out of character for me.  I always go to the same shop for my haircut, and on the last two or three visits, I’ve noticed the same hat hanging on the coat rack where the customers can leave their coats or hats.  At least a month that hat’s been hanging there, I think, and find myself wondering how many other people have noticed it.  Do the staff know about it?  What about the other customers?  Surely I’m not the only one.

And then it happens.  After getting my haircut, and I’m retrieving my own coat, I look at the hat and without another thought, pluck it off the rack and walk out the door.  A thief!

What in the world?  What’s happening to me?  Am I subconsciously sinking into some sort of survival mode?  Should I secure a shopping cart and begin loading it up with treasures? 

Back home I set the cap on the kitchen table and stare at while I write this.  I think I fully expect a disembodied head to appear inside of it any moment, the previous owner maybe, who will float around my kitchen in the stolen cap, explaining to me how the world works.

Maybe I’ll sneak it back into the shop when I get my next haircut.  The stylist will glare down her long nose at me disapprovingly, scissors snapping dangerously close to my ear.

“I can explain,” I’ll begin, but too late!  Snip!!  Suddenly I am the disembodied head!

It’s not like there’s no place in the world for a 4th grade dropout, so I have to question that need by parents to push their children through all the homework and lessons.  Seems to me I survived 4th grade without much help, so now I’m beginning to wonder why I’m being forced to suffer through every concept, idea, notion, and piece of homework that passes through the door.  How many times will I have to help distinguish between the words there, their and they’re?

“I can’t remember!” the boy yells, dropping his pencil.  “There’s so many!” It’s a dramatic display.  An award winning performance that’s gone on for two hours straight, the homework project the night’s sole feature presentation.

“There are only three.  I know you can remember three things.” I don’t mention my propensity to spell out the difference between the words were and where almost every single time one of them is required.  My invisible weakness.  Certainly not something I drop a pencil over, but then, I suppose I need to remember that I’m playing the bit part here, not the lead role.

The night finally comes to an end and we head to bed.  In the dark I try to write a new script for tomorrow morning’s encore performance.  I close my eyes, and what seems like two minutes later, the curtain rises and the actors come on stage.  Morning again.

“Better get in the shower right away,” I say.  “It’ll wake you up so you can get busy.”

Is that really the best opening line I could come up with last night?  The boy, on the other hand, has taken the night to perfect his character.  He snarls and draws tight the blanket he has wrapped over his shoulders.  And I do believe he’s grown a hump.

I pick up the papers and start climbing the bell tower, following the boy.  We’ll get through this thing together, I swear.  How bad can a 4th grade replay be, anyway?  The eraser slips from my fingers.  I watch it fall for what seems like forever, then disappear into the morning fog.  I like to think that I hear it bounce as it hits the ground, but of course that would be impossible.

from Toothpaste For Dinner