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When I am gone, my son wants to know if he can come over some times.  He has his own key.

“Just make sure you lock the door when you leave, “ I say.  “We wouldn’t want any hobos walking into the place.”

This, of course, disintegrated into a conversation about just how many hobos would actually fit into the apartment.  At roughly 1200 square feet, we both guessed at least 1000 hobos.

“That’s a lot of hobos,” I say.

“They’d be packed in pretty tight,” my son says.

“I’m thinking tempers might flare,” I say.

“Yea,” my son replies.  “But no one could fight because their arms would be pinned down to their sides.

“You’re right,” I say.  It’s an easy thing to visualize.

So in the end we decide that while a handful of hobos are dangerous, a thousand or so wouldn’t cause as much trouble as one would expect.

Just under the surface of my son lies a pool of something that is not always calm.  He’s an intelligent hothead.  The kind of person who either rises to greatness or falls hard by his own undoing.  Maybe this is just the way of eight year olds, I don’t know.  What I do know is that you could see this same thing flair up in his eyes a long time ago.  Back then we called it his Agressive Face, and if you knew what to look for, you could cut off just about 90% of the mischief.  But as he’s grown older, the Agressive Face isn’t as easy to read.  And let’s face it, it’s just not as cute at eight as it was at, say, two or three.

So I’ve just come from school, where a meeting took place in an attempt to narrow the boy’s path of righteousness.  It seems he has been taking up more then his fair share of the playground the last couple of days.  Someone was pushed.  Bark dust was flying.  Accusations and a bumped head.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that George Foreman was out on the playground, looking for new sparring partners to help stage another boxing comeback.  George Foreman, the man who is, according to tabloid headlines, The Happiest Man on Earth.

But I know it’s not George Foreman out there on the playground causing trouble.  It’s my son.  And all this time I thought they were just preparing for third grade.  Or maybe pushing and shoving is proper preparation these days.  My son does have a fascination with presidents.  Maybe this newfound aggressiveness is just his attempt to enter mainstream politics as a budding young imperialistic Republican.  I’m not sure what it is kids preparing for third grade think about.  It’s been so long since I was in third grade that I remember hardly anything.  I sat between a red-headed Irish boy named Shane and a girl with long blond hair and a harelip named Mary.  The girl’s name was Mary, not the harelip.  I hardly have time this morning to worry much about dangling modifiers.  I also remember that I wrote a very long story about an old brown shoe, which was, of course, inspired by the Beatles.  Later on I would imitate George Harrison in a talent show.  But that’s a fourth grade story, which won’t surface properly for at least two years.

But back to my child rearing tale before I am completely derailed.

Let’s hope I’ve diffused the playground bomb.  Hmmm.  This sounds a lot like a dream I recently observed. I am not naive enough to think that the timer has been turned off completely.  The fuse of any boy is apt to re-ignite at any given moment.  I’m not sure if it’s hormones that cause all of the trouble, or the fact that when a boy looks down at his feet he can actually see them growing.  It happens that fast.  If you think about it, that’s enough to piss anyone off.

Now it is back to work.  More bids and phone calls.  Lining up the work to keep my small crew of smiling men busy for the ten days I am gone.  It’s not easy to arrange a day schedule that keeps a crew of non-English speaking laborers in complete harmony with a collection of English-only speaking customers.  It’s a lot like watching your feet grow.

But so far so good.  It’s 11:00 a.m. and I haven’t pushed anyone down all morning.  But I did bump my head and go three rounds with Big George Foreman.  But I lucked out.  It was George the Preacher who knocked me around, not George the Fighter.  Still, both punch pretty hard.  But we’ve worked out our differences and will be grilling up burgers later this afternoon.

::: 1 :::

In a house filled with nothing but storytellers, it is sometimes hard to know what to believe.  Fact and fiction live side by side, or more accurately, in one big tumbled mess that has no apparent regard for order.  It can be frustrating and disconcerting for the uninitiated, and might easily be compared to the first few hot days of spring.  Those first couple of days where the temperature soars into the upper 80’s and the heat is sticky and uncomfortable and almost unbearable until one has had a chance to acclimate to the sudden change.  But our bodies adjust and our minds right along with them, and once this is done, the warmth becomes both pleasurable and expected, and for as long as the season lasts, you can’t imagine a time without it.

That’s what it’s like in our house of storytellers.  The conversations roll through like rapidly changing seasons, one constantly replacing the next, each an unreliable mix of both things real and unreal delivered with the straightest of faces.  It is hard to know what to believe.  Truth exists in our house, somewhere and somehow, but it’s a hard thing to get a hold of.  The stories that come out of our mouths too often sound as if the breath needed to deliver them was sucked from the idea of a helium balloon, too shriveled and old to float on its own. 

Take, for example, the story of the 100 pound baby.

::: 2 :::

Stories have a way of unraveling the more they are told.  They become like the skin of an apple that has been peeled in one long continuous carefully swirled cut.  The best you can hope for is to hold it there in your palm and remember the way it once was, in the beginning.  That’s how it is in our house of storytellers.  Nothing keeps its shape.  Everything, one way or another, will end up unraveled.

As with most stories, the story of the 100 pound baby began around a simple idea - a baby is born.  It sounded like the kind of story I like, so I listened as I brushed my teeth and got ready for bed.  I’ve always liked stories with simple beginnings.  I’m a sucker for fairy tales and children’s books.  I like reading big, blocky words that flow around colorful pictures of kids with abnormally large, round heads and big, toothy smiles.  I like talking animals and folklore, mythology and anything to do with someone sneaking around causing mischief.  I like simple lessons and problems with clear solutions.  A story about a 100 pound baby sounded right up my alley, so I listened.

“Dad, the baby was born just like any other baby.  Except this one was big.  Really big.  The mother screamed and wiggled around quite a bit to get him out.”

“Well, having a baby is hard.  It hurts.  Just about everyone screams and wiggles around.”

“No Dad, you don’t understand.  This baby weighed 100 pounds!”

100 pounds?  Funny, that this baby should happen to weigh the exact same amount as my son, the storyteller.  I keep this fact to myself.

“Dad, the baby came out just about as big as me.  It couldn’t talk or anything, but it was big.  Two doctors picked him up and weighed him and the scale said exactly 100 pounds.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like this.  Why didn’t I hear about this on the news?”

“It was on the baby channel.  I watched it there.”

“I’ve never heard of the baby channel.”

“Well that doesn’t mean anything.  I saw it and I know what I saw.”

“Okay.  But I don’t see how anyone could have a 100 pound baby.  I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Dad, I saw it.  That’s why the mom was screaming and wiggling.”

I think about the births that I’ve seen up close, or at least about the births that I can remember seeing up close.  Medicated, numb events, with mother’s so worn out from the pain that you find yourself glancing at the monitors just to see if she’s still alive.  And these were the result of ten pound babies.

“A 100 pound baby must really hurt.”

My son’s voice suddenly grows quieter, and he leans in close, like someone else might hear, even though we are alone in the apartment.  This is important, I can tell.  I stop brushing so I don’t miss the hushed words.

“Her vagina ripped dad.  The baby was too big and it ripped.  It ripped and was infected for the rest of her life.” He says the word infected with added emphasis.  I hear him do this, but find myself missing the point.  I don’t know what to say, and must be staring at him because he keeps talking.  “I saw it dad.  It was all on the baby channel.”

I turn back to the mirror and see myself brushing my teeth.  There are probably a hundred things I should ask my son at this very moment.  It would probably be an excellent time to launch into a serious discussion about childbirth and reproduction and anything else I could happen to think of.  But I can’t really think of anything.  I see him there in the mirror’s reflection, my little storyteller, his eyes wide and excited as he watches me and waits for my response.  There is, it sometimes seems, no story without there also being a response.  What good is a story if it doesn’t have a listener?  In the mirror, I watch him.  Unobserved.  He is still too young to see that inside of every story lies yet another story. 

I pretend to finish brushing my teeth, buying time as I think of what I might say.  There is really no telling what he has seen on television.  Maybe he did watch a birth.  Maybe he did witness the pain of childbirth and is putting it back together in a way that makes sense to him.  Who knows, maybe there was a woman who gave birth to a 100 pound baby and everyone knows about it except me.  The point is, I will never really know what he has seen.  I could question him and try to pin him down on the facts, but at eight years old, he already knows his way around a good story.  Truth, wherever it is, will be a hard thing to get a hold of.

I say the first thing that comes to my mind.

“Are you sure you mean infected?  Maybe you mean affected?”

A 100 pound baby is born and I try to argue semantics with an eight year old boy.  He is having none of it.

“Dad!  It was a 100 pound baby!  I’m pretty sure you’d get a bad infection from something like that!”

I turn out the bathroom light and climb into bed.  How can I argue with that kind of logic?

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to hear the best part of the story?”

“You mean there’s more?”

“Of course.  Don’t you want to hear about what happened to the baby?”

He crawls into bed next to me, flipping the blankets and fluffing pillows.  I hear his head plop down in the dark, and the sound makes me think of him as a cartoon in a book.  His words will soon be all around us, big, blocky letters adding a comfortable weight to the blankets.  His head will be as big and round as a 100 pound baby’s, and the story will unravel around his eyes, big and wide in the darkness.

::: 3 :::

Yesterday and today are fast and deliberate with no time for thinking.  Precision is imperative.  Believability hinges on perfect timing.

You might compare my life to a Drew Barrymore fight scene in a Charlie’s Angels movie.  With perfect choreography it is almost halfway believable.  But mostly you’ll find yourself scoffing and wishing for your money back.

Of course, this may all just be a big crock of make believe.  I’ve never actually seen Drew Barrymore in a Charlie’s Angels movie.  Maybe she doesn’t fight at all.  Maybe she just falls in big puddles and stands around shivering in wet clothes.

If that’s what happens, then go ahead and imagine that one instead.  It sums things up just as well.