The Raging Elitist

At 8:30 on Saturday night, the last non-school night of Thanksgiving break, Scotty was startled and disappointed to learn his evening was coming to an end. He was sitting on the couch with his feet in a warm salt bath, about to have the dry skin scraped from his soles by his mother. “What!” he said when I told him the time. His torso stiffened like he was about to spring up from his seat and run away, only the water in the little foot tub anchored him in place as if it had turned to concrete. “How!” he said indignantly from behind his glasses, the jolt he’d just suffered causing a little ripple around his ankles. “It was just 6:30!” Two hours had passed without his noticing. He thought the fun was only just getting underway, that he had time yet to kill.

A similar sense of panicked disbelief gripped me the night before when I looked through the boys’ old yearbook photos. Every year Danyelle takes down last year’s pictures from the frames on the mantle, one of Cartter and the other of Scotty, and replaces them with the more current versions. The old photos go in an envelope. To flip through them is to wonder at the years the same way Scotty wondered at the hours the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Features soften, teeth go missing, and one suddenly ends up staring at a toddler, stunned that so much could have changed so quickly, right under one’s nose, and gone undetected. Once the denial and sense of loss pass, rededication to the moment seems the only rational response, so after I slid the old photos back in the envelope and tucked them into the drawer next to the couch, I resolved to make the most of the weekend with the boys.

It was to my horror that I realized I had only one weekend free out of the next three before Christmas, and in a fit of holiday spirit, I spent half of the following day stringing icicle lights from the gutters, during the Clemson/Carolina football game no less. The boys ran outside to tell me when the game came back from commercial break and when there was a big play. I joined them at intervals to watch, and in between those spells, I must have gone up and down the ladder a hundred times. It took me a few tries to get the big run from the side door around the den to the front of the house. Three strings of lights just barely reached, and they had to be positioned just so. On my first try, an old lady with her dog walked by and said sarcastically, “Having fun yet?” I thought she seemed a little jaded. By my third try, when Danyelle came out to offer criticisms based on her experiences from past years, I paused for a moment atop the ladder and remembered that old lady with a touch of bitterness. I hadn’t wanted her to be right, but in the end, my self-satisfied Christmas cheer was tainted by a slight note of frustration.

I hung the icicles that day, because I planned to walk to dinner with Danyelle and the boys, and I wanted to see the lights’ golden warm glow glistening from the roof when we rounded the bend and came down the street on our way back. I thought it would make Cartter and Scotty forget that their Thanksgiving break was almost over and give them instead the feeling that they were just beginning the most magical time of year. The plan eventually came off, but first, when we were almost to the restaurant, two miles away from the house, Cartter buried his face inside his jacket and started shivering, his pace slowed nearly to a crawl. I looked down and realized that despite my specific instructions, he was wearing ankle socks.

“I told him,” I whined to Danyelle.

“He didn’t listen,” she said in his defense.

“That’s the problem.”

My desire to spend time with the boys is not totally unlike my desire to hang Christmas lights: sometimes, following through on that desire becomes so tedious, I just want to get the hell away and get drunk watching the game with a buddy. That’s how I’d planned on wrapping Thanksgiving weekend before I felt time’s grip around my throat while I stared at my sons’ old yearbook photos. The boys’ antics had taken their toll, and I was ready for a little break.

During their week away from school, Cartter and Scotty dominated our house. The instances of Danyelle’s and my subservience were numerous: The living room transformed into a fort with a little sign outside its soft walls identifying the structure as home to “Scott Law,” inside which the boys rolled around giggling and making up commercials about soliciting personal injury suits; in another case, during a moment of extreme intimacy, Danyelle and I were interrupted by a very untimely stream of loud, garbled nonsense, which was apparently Scotty’s impression of some asinine adult (maybe a client of Scott Law); then there was Thanksgiving night, when I informed the boys that it was time to go to bed, and Cartter responded by saying, “I’m hungry,” a remark which left me completely baffled.

I’m lucky to have so little to complain about. I wouldn’t even count any of the above examples as transgressions. I actually find them pretty adorable. Still, I’d like to sit down in my living room without first rearranging the furniture; I’d like to ejaculate without the distraction of a braying ass down the hall; I’d like not to prepare another meal at 8:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving; and I’d like my son to listen to me when I tell him, “Put on long socks. It’s cold outside.” Of course, I’ll likely be granted all these wishes one day soon, and at that point, I’ll end up looking back at this year’s yearbook photos, wondering where all the time went, rushing outside to hang up the icicles from the roof, hoping the boys will understand how much I love them.

Miscellaneous

We’re nearing the end of The House on Pooh Corner. It’s my second round with the book. The first came a few years ago with just Cartter, and the final chapter reduced me to tears. Cartter and Scotty always want more any night we read a chapter. Winnie the Pooh seems to calm them like no other book I’ve read with them. The other night we read two chapters and afterwards, they stalled on going to bed, Cartter perched on the couch next to me, Scotty sitting on the floor Indian style. They wanted to know why the days got shorter in December, what would happen if you drilled through the Earth, and of what sort of stuff the other heavenly bodies were composed.

Among the Christmas memories that drive me to savor this time with the boys, one that stands out is the night we walked them through the Charleston Place Hotel and showed them the tall tree and the big train set. Afterwards, we took them to D’Alessandro’s Pizza, and they were enamored of all the kitschy junk hanging on the walls.

This is the first year I’ve led the lights project since Cartter and Scotty were still toddlers, back when I went Clark Griswold on the French doors that used to line the living room and dining area walls. I strung them with multicolored lights inside and out, five sets of French doors, and the reddish glow was so powerful that it was actually nauseating.

Sammy’s acorn binge continues. The nuts are showing up in her poop, and she’s taken to throwing up lately. Danyelle and I have been experimenting with letting her off leash in the park, because her tugging to get at the acorns is so maddening. She’s gradually getting more comfortable running away from us again, but she doesn’t go nearly as far or disappear for as long as she did in her younger, healthier days.

Sitting in the booth at Coleman Public House, after my frustration with Cartter’s footwear had passed, and before we walked back home to where the icicle lights awaited us, Scotty abruptly launched into a conversation about “frankness.” I explained the word as best as I could, and Cartter gathered from my definition that being frank was a bad thing, that there was a certain rudeness involved. I told him that being frank wasn’t a problem for him. Scotty is franker, and being frank has certain advantages, namely the ability to get to the point. Cartter, on the other hand, tends more toward caginess, another word which called for an explanation, and another explanation which met Cartter’s grinning approval.

The boys continue to lament the loss of their friendship with Bennett, especially Cartter. Walking past his house on Saturday night reintroduced some of the angst they’ve been feeling. For Danyelle and me, things have been easier without Bennett hanging around the house. The boys spent hours most days of their break in the Rivers’ yard next door playing tackle football with those two boys. Once I peeked over there and saw Scotty take a particularly rough hit and come up rubbing his head. He’s always the one to get hurt or to have it out with another boy. Probably because he’s franker than Cartter. He told me that the younger Rivers boy Judah told him that “it’s not his house, and he doesn’t make the rules.” He also told me that of the two brothers, Judah, who is about a year his younger, is more his friend.