So we got up this morning and first on the agenda was that the curious friends, Joe's alter egos, were trapped and there was lava rising all around them. We are allowed to rise at 7:00 AM here, which is 0700 for you French people who never seem to be able to tell me what time it is -- "Il est quatorze, et le singe est sur l'arbre" -- and so at 7:02 (Joe's slipping) I was mobbed by curious friends on my futon. They immediately began to lose their tenuous grip on the hillside as the lava rose up and swept them toward certain destruction. No amount of profession that the world would be better off without a few curious friends would convince them just to DIE IN THE FIERY FURNACE QUIETLY. So I hauled them, one at a time, each one a little Marcel Marceau of intention and action, back to safety.
After that I started breakfast, while the curious friends joined Joe to watch Timon and Pumbaa. We had bacon, and a grapefruit sectioned hotel-style, and Portuguese sweet muffins made by someone who sells them to the grocery store. (Yesterday, they were my sweet muffins. There's a mistake I won't repeat. Want a sweet muffin? Get you someone from Portugal. Ain't no redneck worth calling to make you a sweet muffin. Other hand, I'm betting those seafaring Iberians don't do much of a flaky biscuit.) And then we went to gymnastics, after we did the laundry dance. The laundry dance is what you do when you realize that all the clothes you need are in a dryer which is located elsewhere and that a great deal of snow separates you and the dryer, which is in another dwelling altogether. So Joe had to go with dress socks, a T-shirt, and jeans with paint on them long enough to attain said dryer. That was when we went to gymnastics, after.
Now, gymnastics with a six-year-old is a treat. They put them on high bars. They put them on trampolines. They let them leap fearlessly. All of this is OK, if occasionally a little cringe-y -- UNTIL THE CHILD SEES FURNITURE LATER IN THE DAY. Next thing you know, little Ivor is in full leap mode, swinging madly through the branches, high above the brick hearth and the $50 remote control, shrieking like a banshee. I tell you what. And is there anything you would rather do than listen to a six-year-old berate you twice in the same day for the dress socks that he had to put on because of the Laundry Through the Snow incident? So what did I do? There we were, getting dressed after gymnastics, in the Party Room at the Gymnastics place, a room which has a Huge Mirror, and I distracted Joe from the Soggy Dress Socks by pointing out that one could make faces in the Very Large Mirror and that one might look auspiciously silly as a result.
Never point out to a six-year-old that there is a place where you can make faces and see yourself doing it.
Several hours later, as we left the room, some of us more reluctantly than others and with fewer feet on the ground by a factor that would result in a division-by-zero error and NONE OF US WANTS THAT, we made plans to Shop For Mom's Gift and also to Shop For Gramma's GPS Wall Charger.
We went to A Big Retail Store.
You know what's coming, don't you?
Have you EVER been to a A Big Retail Store with a six-year-old in the Christmas season? It's like taking a bee to a florist and telling it you're just there to get some vases.
[Shudder.]
So we got to the Big Retail Store and we walk in the door. Joe has some snow globes in mind for his mother. And we find them right away, which is a stinking miracle and for which I doubtless owe the Retail gods (who is that, anyway? Andy Warhol? Did he end up a god?) and then I decide that I need some extra shirts. I like a shirt I just got at This Big Retail Store a few weeks ago because I think it looks OK and so, being a man, I just got two. So I went to where the shirts were last time and they weren't there any more.
Men do not understand this. "The shirts were right here," I said to Joe. "You saw them. Right here."
Joe, being another kind of male -- the small male who is really Into Clothing, as opposed to his father, who has to be told to Put Clothing On in the morning lest he forget -- said, "There are other shirts here, Dad."
I mused.
I picked up a shirt. It was not the shirt that had been there before. I was like the sad panda, baffled at the disappearance of a grove of bamboo -- where it had been in China now replaced by a factory manufacturing snow globes for sale to the U.S. market. I made a sad panda face.
"This is not the shirt I was looking for," I said to Joe. "Furthermore," I said to Joe, "This shirt says 'Athletic Fit.' Joe, what do you think that means, 'Athletic Fit'?" Joe is not a bashful child, unless you think of saltwater crocodiles with great light-'em-up scaly wings as bashful, but he made it clear this was also beyond his ken. I held the shirt aloft -- for some men, myself included, actually touching the merchandise apparel in a Big Retail Store requires months, or even years, of therapy, and medication that would harm a panda -- and saw that athletic fit means "Not For You To Wear, Mister They're Love Handles, I Think, Or Maybe I Never Took Off The Inner Tube After I Shot Angel Falls That Summer When We Were Eighteen."
Joe looked at me. I looked at Joe. I looked around. The only fit on anything I could see was Athletic Fit.
In self-defense, I picked up some gloves. "I need ski gloves," I said, and reprised a song I sang Joe earlier today at a moment when he was at a loss as to his gloves' whereabouts, "Looking for gloves, in all the wrong places..." and then "All we need is gloves, bah bah bah bah bah!" Then, abashed at my lack of athletic fit, I stopped singing.
"I need some socks," he said.
"I just bought you socks," I said. "I bought you socks when you were here before."
"I believe that the socks are escaping our house," he said. "I believe that they are getting up at night and sneaking out in groups. I believe that they are going someplace we will never find them."
While I was laughing hysterically, I placed a small package of socks (for small feet) in the cart. We had snow globes and socks, now. We were ready. All we needed was Gramma's charger.
I went to the electronics section. I went to the salesboy. I said, Salesboy, Where Are The Chargers For Gramma's GPS Device, Which I Have Here In Its Case, Also With the Manual, Like Some Lame Old Person?
The sales boy was perplexed. "Team," he said via walkie-talkie to an invisible cadre of crack Retail SEALs, ready to fan out through the aisles, "do we have chargers for [Gramma's GPS System]?"
There was a soft crackling noise. "Get ready for a wave at the registers!" said a feminine voice of authority. I involuntarily braced myself. And then, silence. I feared for Salesboy's colleagues. I suspected foul play. Or perhaps, skullduggery near the notions.
The sales boy barked -- well, yapped -- a few more commands, but was ignored. Soon, he came to me and advised me his manager would be along at any minute.
Joe and I discussed the arithmetic behind an offer to spend $599.99 but receive a $50 gift card. Joe felt that was a fine offer. I was less sure. I tried to remember shopping with my father before Christmas, at the Thalhimer's downtown, where my memory was of a perfumed fountain and a general sense of glamor. It had a notions department. A fella could buy caviar for his Mom, or a hat for a girl, or ornaments. It did not have chargers.
Finally, the Salesboy approached again. He had given up hope on his manager. Instead, he sent me up the aisle, to the end of the aisle near the auto products, where there would be GPS devices, possibly, on an end cap.
The route to this end cap -- which proved, ultimately, to be largely mythical, or even apocryphal, the sort of story a Salesboy might tell a 41-year-old man in a red fedora who is accompanied by a cart with two snow globes, children's socks, and a six-year-old wearing a skull stocking cap under his Santa hat -- went through the toy section.
Madness.
Joe was hanging onto the shopping cart, and like a wounded rain dancer, I pushed the cart and tried to stay between him and the toys. I puffed up my body -- no mean feat, as I am so slender and antelope-like as to need garments to be seen on cloudy days, which is why it is important to remind me to don garments, or, at least, it is ONE reason that is important -- and stood between him and the toys at pauses to allow Less Cautious People to drift past us, scows fighting against a hellish tide. I made it past the Transformers. I made it past Thomas. I made it past Spiderman, and the Bratz. I was like Odysseus's men clinging to the sheep while Polyphemus raged. I got to the Area Where The End Cap With the GPS Systems Had Last Been Sighted Putatively By Salesboy.
I stepped away from the cart to scrutinize the end cap.
It was over.
Joe hit the toy section like a wolverine hits a 4-H Club Bunny Show.
Now, let me be clear, and in Joe's favor. Joe knows he must buy toys with his own money. He knows he must select toys carefully. He is well-behaved and gracious about toy purchasing. He has been paying off a toy by marking crosses through scanned and printed quarters on my fridge for months.
But, oh God, the toy section at a Big Retail Store.
We checked prices. We weighed options. We discussed quality. ("The toy must be good quality, Dad," said Joe. "Look at how many they made! They wouldn't make them if they were bad quality!")
Finally, we got a toy.
We checked out.
It was time to eat lunch. We ate lunch. Joe read his new favorite book, which is rather a step up from "Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!" which he was reading three months ago. What, do kid's neurons essentially just coil and uncoil like mambas? It's VERY WEIRD.
Then we went to get the tree. Luckily, the tree was in the middle of a snowy field. Luckily, there was ample snow in the field. Luckily, Joe had on snow pants. I need snow pants. Or a flask.
Joe spotted deer tracks. We followed them, bloodhounds in nylons with fiberfill stuffing, across a stone wall and to a patch of ruffled snow. I pointed to the scuffled leaves and had Joe look up. What kind of tree, I asked. Maple? No. Oak, I said. They were eating red oak acorns.
OK, so I'm no Squanto. Give a Dad some room.
We found the proper tree. We marked it with the Santa hat.
We brought the tree back to the house. What kind of tree is it? Go find Leatherstocking and ask him. It's a $60 tree is all I know. A $60, darn festive tree.
At the end of the day, after starting a french bread loaf in mid-afternoon, punching it down with the tree in the back of the car on the way to the house, then pushing it down again when we got back here, and then shaping it into boules and and a baguette, we baked the loaves. It was my first French bread, and I put the black iron skillet on the bottom shelf, and threw in some ice cubes. The steam makes crust. The smoke detector went off seven times while it baked, but when I took it out, and cut a piece off hot, and gave it to Joe, and had some myself, we agreed: Best bread ever.
"Best bread ever, Dad." And while he watched Timon and Pumbaa again, I did sit down to see the second half with him, picking absently at the black thread Joe had tied the finger-puppet giraffe to the doorknob with. "It's a giraffe trap," Joe said. "You send the giraffe to space. He likes it. Wouldn't you?"
Some days, that's a hard question to answer. Not today, though.
