Tag: kids

Remote Controlled Lunatic (Or, children make you insane, vol. 271)

PavowskiLeave a comment

Being a parent means so many little changes in your life.  Big ones, too, naturally, but little ones that don’t even really trip the radar.  There’s the level of ambient noise you perceive as “normal” in your house or the world (increases the longer you have kids).  There’s a general level of cleanliness you’re willing to accept (and which deteriorates over time).  There’s the idea of being awakened in the middle of the night for things short of the house literally being in flames or an actual intruder coming to murder your face (goes from “hardly ever acceptable” to “pretty much planned and expected every night”).  And you’re aware of these things in a detached way but not so much that you actively think about them.

Then there are the things that sneak up on you and which you accept so completely and unquestioningly that it shocks you in retrospect.  For example, I am willing to believe just about anything my wife tells me that I know about or knew about.  She could lie to me and tell me that she explained the meaning of life to me in all its nuanced poetic simplicity over pancakes yesterday, and I would believe it in a heartbeat despite not actually being in possession of said knowledge, and also knowing full well that we did not have pancakes yesterday.  My mind has become a leaky sieve, and I am no longer a good judge of whether or not I have heard something before and whether I told a thing to somebody or whether I remembered to put on pants before the family came over for dinner (spoiler alert: I didn’t, and continued to prep dinner for thirty minutes in my pajamas before my wife pulled me aside to correct the situation).

All that is to say that I no longer trust myself to know what’s actually going on right in front of me, and I will latch like a facehugger onto any explanation which presents itself, whether that explanation is reasonable or not.

Case in point.

I’m driving to work the other morning.  It’s not even a discombobulated, late, running-out-the-door-with-shaving-cream-still-on-my-ear kind of morning.  I woke up, ran, showered, shaved, had breakfast, said goodbye to the wife and kids, and got into the car and drove off.  I even remembered my pants.  I turn on the radio and I’m listening to the prattle of the Bert Show as one of the DJs (is she a DJ if she doesn’t wrangle music?… whatever) professes that she can divine facts about a person’s life just by looking at their wedding registry.  You know, high-brow entertainment.  So I’m driving and not-really-listening when I hear this voice.

It’s a strange voice.  It’s too high and too stilted and the cadence is weird and I can’t make out a word of what it’s saying.  It’s not speaking a foreign language, it’s just speaking at the lower register of what’s audible.  I turn down the radio and it stops.  “Okay,” my brain thinks, “it’s just ambient noise from the studio, maybe somebody forgot to squelch a mic or wandered through the studio gossiping about their weekend.  No worry.”  And on I drive.

Then I hear it again, same weird pitch, same weird cadence, same inaudible volume.  But I hear it more distinctly now.  A voice outside the car?  I’m driving through a neighborhood so it’s possible it could have been a kid shouting.  I buy it until I look in the mirror and see no evidence of any kids waiting on buses anywhere in the vicinity.  I turn the radio off and it stops again.  Fishy.  On I drive.

It’s when I hear the alien voice for a third time that my brain just throws up its hands and says, “Okay, I give up, you’re obviously going insane and hearing voices is just a part of your life now.”  I still can’t make out the words, but the voice is insistent and deliberate under the drone of the radio.  I’ve switched stations so I know it’s not an artifact of the studio.  I’m no longer in a residential area so it can’t be somebody speaking outside the car.    Yet there it is, sounding almost like it’s coming from inside my own head.  Do I have to be concerned about hearing voices?  Does it matter if there’s a sinister voice telling me to kill people if I can’t understand what it’s saying?  Maybe it’s my subconscious whispering to me in German because I somehow subliminally understand German from a past life I had living in feudal Germany?  I turn off the radio to be alone with my thoughts and drive for a solid five minutes under the assumption that this oddball voice is just something I’m going to have to learn to live with.

Then I come up on a red light and stop, and I hear the voice again.  Without the hum of the radio and the whimper of the car’s engine, the voice is suddenly crystal clear, if still muffled and distant sounding in my head.

“Nine!  This is the number, NINE.”  *Boing, boing, boing*

And immediately my mind flashes back in time two months to the time my son brought this horribly annoying Grover “remote control” that talks to you when you push its buttons and how much I hated that toy and how happy I didn’t realize I was when he somehow didn’t have it when we got out of the car; so happy I didn’t bother to think what had happened to it.  Obviously it slipped from his hand and slithered across the cheeto- and cheerio-crusted floor and found its way up under the driver’s seat and wedged itself in amongst the discarded coke cans and the seat’s guide rails and waited, WAITED for me to forget all about it so that it could one day — THIS DAY — begin using the momentum of the car to fling itself against a screw, which would depress the number “9” button, so that it could prattle its inane message that “THIS IS THE NUMBER NINE” into my subconscious under the guise of being radio interference.

Look, the toy is not sentient, okay?  I know that.  I HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT.  This story is not about the toy, it’s about the mind of an adult turning to mush after two years of looking after a tiny human.  It’s about the fact that it seemed — and I am not exaggerating in the least here, though I am wont to do so — more reasonable to me that I had actually gone GIBBERING INSANE on my ride into work than that a perfectly innocuous toy might have been triggered in the backseat and started singing about the number nine.  In other words, simple problem-solving strategies and common sense filters completely failed me in that moment.

Why have they failed me?  Because there is no simple problem solving strategy, and there is no such thing as common sense when you have a toddler.  I found a stuffed animal crammed into one of our living room lamps the other night.  I don’t even know how the kid was able to reach high enough to get the thing in there, or how my wife and I failed to notice it lurking, bright orange and horribly silhouetted, against the lampshade for the weeks it was up there (judging from the healthy layer of dust).  I had to tell my kid not to drink bathwater out of his little pitcher thingy not thirty seconds after he had nearly drowned himself in the tub DRINKING BATHWATER OUT OF THE LITTLE PITCHER THINGY.  The phrase, “You can’t have any smarty-candies because you didn’t make a poop” actually came out of my mouth.  I’ve cleaned MUSTARD off of the TELEVISION.  And that was all just in the last two days.

I don’t want to say that the kid(s) made me crazy.  They didn’t.  They’re only tiny little humans.  What they’ve done is eroded my mind and made me into something like a child again myself.  Higher-level thinking goes out the window when you’re a parent.  You start believing in fantastical, ridiculous sharknado because you forget to care about whether it makes sense or not.

Did I give the impression that all this was a bad thing?  I’m not sure that it is.

The Equal Amateur

Pavowski2 Comments

A Random Title Challenge from Chuck this week.  In keeping with my last several posts, I thought long and hard about how to attack this prompt, and then realized that the right way was literally right under my nose.

Here, then, is The Equal Amateur, a tale of a cold and heartless world where all your efforts and learning and experience don’t mean sharknado next to the bright and talented young upstart.

 

The Equal Amateur

“Son of a bitch,” Nick thinks, casting a subversive eye at the lump of protoplasm squirming in the holding unit at the far end of the cell.  “What’s happening here?”

It’s swatting at imaginary flies now, but that always precedes the screaming.  Sure enough, after just a few moments of flailing its stubby suggestions of arms (they look more like tiny, squishy marshmallows conglomerated on sticks to Nick), the lump begins to wail, a wordless, plaintive cry that somehow seems to permeate his consciousness.  He sets down his brightly colored blue plastic floor-smasher and stares at her.  He almost sighs and shakes his head, but he hasn’t yet learned the significance of such a gesture.  “It’ll never work, kid.  Words.  Words are the future.”

But even as he thinks it, one of the Keepers hops up from the sitting apparatus and hurries — practically sprints — to the lump, scoops it up in loving arms, and begins to babble incoherent speech at it in a tone Nick sort of remembers in his own unfinished cortex.  A tone of soothing, of comforting.  Nick’s mouth hangs open and he stares, astounded, furious, perplexed.  “I’ve got to throw myself on the ground outside — get all that painful red smeary stuff on my parts — to get that kind of attention.  And the lump just has to whine a little bit?”

Time was, Nick reflects, that seniority spoke for something around here.  When he could get the Keepers’ attention with just a cock of his head or an insignificant, purposeless spasm of his fingers.  He’s put in the time learning their language, learning where the food is kept, learning which of the animals can be safely ridden and which scream and yowl when touched.  Now all the Keepers seem concerned with is shoving a variety of foodstuffs under his nose or into his hands, removing the smelly brown goop from his privates when it inexplicably shows up, and making sure he sleeps more than he would particularly care to.  Sure, they laugh and clap when he manages to pronounce some new word in their alien tongue, but their joy is fleeting and quickly forgotten.

Then there’s the lump.  The lump has been in the detention center for only a few days, but has already started throwing her weight around.  For some reason Nick can’t wrap his tiny cranium around, the Keepers respond to every twitch, every whimper, every little thing the lump does with a care and affection and concern he’s not known since he can remember, although to be fair, the rapid expansion of his brain and the constant barrage of new interesting information — new things to ingest, new words to try out, new colored sticks to rub against the walls to mark the period of his imprisonment — doesn’t leave a lot of room for memory and reflection.  Still, it seems unjust.  He’s put in two years with the Keepers, knows their routines, knows how to get a rise out of them, knows how to get them to leave him alone.  Knows that if he ululates at just the right frequency, he can get the male’s eye to twitch, and then he can get anything he can find the word to ask for.  Unfortunately for him, he only knows words like “popsicle” and “string cheese” and has not yet learned the words for “existential fulfillment” or “the sweet relaxing freedom of a nap among the daffodils.”  Knows that if he pretends to be hurt, the female will hug him and squeeze him and tell him that she loves him, and then it’s time to ask for more popsicles.

No, the lump doesn’t even have to ask and they’re showering her with clean dressings.  The lump needs only twitch and they pick her up and bundle her close.  Should the lump begin to cry, they lock down the unit and find a way to make her happy, even going so far as to put her in the Swing.  The thought makes Nick’s blood boil.  He doesn’t fit in the Swing anymore, and they haven’t shown any signs of getting one that fits him.  Funding, probably, or maybe they just don’t care.  He’s tried to sneak into it anyway but the Keepers shout at him and threaten him with solitary confinement: the dreaded “Time Out.”   Much though he loathes them, is frustrated by them, attempts to find ways to skirt their authority, the thought of their separation is more than he can bear. He shudders and bites back the bubble of indignant anger that chokes his throat.

The lump has quieted.  The female Keeper puts her back into the holding unit and returns to her vantage point, failing to acknowledge Nick at all but for glancing in his direction to make sure she doesn’t step on him.  He wistfully holds up a crayon to her, willing her to understand his plaintive desire to tell his story, to connect with another like him, to step outside and taste the freedom and run in circles until his tiny legs can no longer support him.  “That’s a good crayon, Nicky.”  The male keeper is falling asleep at his post.  Typical.

Then it dawns on him.  Maybe it’s not that the Keepers don’t love him anymore.  Maybe the lump is just better adapted for the world than he is, for all his practice.  Equal to him, perhaps, without the cumbersome training.  He watches her with suspicious eyes.  Is there something to learn from her?  Fewer words, more inarticulate screaming?  Less intelligent manipulation of the environment, more flailing and stomping and smashing?  It’s a disquieting thought that all he’s learned can be overthrown by one tiny little infant, but it’s hard to argue with the results.  With dawning terror, he realizes that he has a lot to learn from the lump.

Aaaand I’m Sterile (Seriously)

Pavowski7 Comments

It’s been four days, and I can take the icepacks off my crotch.

Okay, I’ve had the icepacks off since the second day, but that certainly doesn’t have the same ring.

As Bill Cosby once put it, “My wife and I have five children.  And the reason why we have five children is because we do not want six.”  My wife and I have two children.  And I am happy to say that there will not be any more additions to the line, from my wife’s and my branch at any rate.

That is to say, at 4 PM this past Thursday, I got the chop.  Vasectomy.  Snip snip and my days of fathering kids are irrevocably done.  My wife asked me several times in the days leading up to the, uh, event, if I was nervous about it.  I was, but only in the sense of this being a permanent modification to the only body I will ever have.  I don’t have tattoos, I don’t have any piercings (well, one in the ear which almost certainly shouldn’t count), I don’t have any metal hips or plastic fingers or anything.  I am strictly factory-issue.  Until now.

Not that I have convictions about marring your own sacred temple or anything.  You get one body, you get one life, do with it what you please.  Tattoo the Mona Lisa on your butt if you want to, or better yet, a space unicorn leaping through a ring of fire around your belly button.  Spike holes the size of tree trunks through your earholes.  The only consequences you’ll have are the funny looks you’ll garner, and in the case of your tree-trunk earrings, probably some chronic neck and back pain.  (What?  I’m over thirty now, this is the stuff I think about.)

It’s a strange feeling.  In biological terms you could make the argument that I no longer qualify as a male.  Certainly there’s a gravity to the fact that, after twelve or so weeks when they can flush out all the cobwebs, I won’t father any more children.  That’s heavy sharknado, man.  A harsh toke.  But it’s also an incredibly calming sensation.  You hear about those couples in their late 30’s, 40’s, hell, even their 50’s who all of a sudden “had a surprise” and bango, they’ve got another sprout running around.  There’s comfort in knowing that won’t be my wife and I.  We’ve had the talk dozens of times about whether or not we want any more kids, and now, having the two, the decision became very, very easy indeed.

What I found humorous about the entire operation (haw, haw) was just how much of a big deal it wasn’t.  When baby was a couple of weeks old, I made an appointment for a consult, which could not have been more of a formality.  Medical history, list of medications I’m taking or allergies I have, and I was scheduled.  They wanted to take a urine sample but, because I’d foolishly gone in the hall right outside the doctor’s office, I couldn’t, and they said it was “no big deal.”  No big deal!  I’m only about to sever my manly bits and thwart my biological imperative.  No big deal.

Then, the day of the event.  In the first place, it’s outpatient surgery, which is a fancy way of saying you don’t go to a hospital and they kick you the fargo out after it’s done.  In fact, my operation (it feels silly to even call it that) was completed on the same exam table I was evaluated on during my consult.  This was a shocker to me given my experiences with hospitals lately (two c-section births for my kids and my wife to go through, one extended stay in hospital for sprout the first immediately following his birth… the concept of an operation that doesn’t require a lengthy ensconcement in hospital is not one that I really understood.  Nonetheless, I arrived for my appointment at 3:45 and was whisked into the exam room and prepped for surgery, and I was on my way home by 4:30.  I was even able to drive myself home.

I won’t go into extreme detail on the operation for the sake of any squeamish men who may be reading, but I will describe it a little for the sake of being thorough.  First of all, about the only direction I was given as far as preparation was to “shave the area”, which was a quarter-sized patch on the front of the… can I say sack?  Let’s say sack.  If you’re a fan of Seinfeld, you’re probably familiar with the episode where Jerry shaves his chest by accident: he set out to correct an irregularity, then he had to even it out, then he realized he had made things worse, and before he knew what was what, his entire torso was shaved and he was howling at the moon, scratching his feeble growth.  This was not unlike that.  I ended up clearing “the area” and a good swath all around.  Doing this in the summer is not something I advise outside of necessity.  The one word that comes to mind is “sticky.”

Anyway, I go in and strip and sit on the table under a paper sheet (not even a gown, remember, I’m not in a hospital) and the nurse comes in to prep me, which involves making small talk about Georgia Tech and slathering brown antiseptic gunk all over my privates.  The doc comes in, gives me the last chance to chicken out, and advises me to lay back.  I have the option to lean forward and watch or lean back and stare at the ceiling.  I chose the latter, because I’d rather not vomit all over myself.

Quick little stab as the lidocaine goes in, and then I feel some pushing and pulling and working but no real sensation.  If you’ve never been under the effects of lidocaine, it’s a bit like being poked and prodded through four or five pairs of socks.  Then, another stick, deeper inside this time, and a spike of cold fire zips all the way down to the, uh, boys, and that’s the last thing I really feel until the cutting.  Well, I think it was the cutting.  Guys, if you’ve ever jumped into the car too fast and sat on your business, that’s the closest thing I can liken it to, except that it was a slow sensation to set in.  Kind of like it was being stepped on, deliberately and slowly.  Then the same thing on the other side, and then they started to mop up.

The business of it was over in about five minutes, which I distinctly remember because it was so freaking fast it almost defied belief.  The actual sensation that I remember most is suppressing my laughter as the doctor stitched me up — he had literal needle and thread and was sewing my, uh, business, up with these comically overstated strokes of the needle, like some lunatic maestro conducting an imaginary orchestra in my pants.  (Okay, I wasn’t wearing pants, but could you… just… come on.)  Nothing but tugging and the swooping of the needle, a tug and a swoop, and I’m biting my lip to keep from cracking up.

And that was that.  I spent the rest of the night with a pack of frozen peas on my crotch, and I spent the next day in the pleasant dizzy haze that only prescription pain meds can legally provide.  Sunday I was off the meds completely and had a little workout late in the day, today I had my first run since the operation and am having no ill effects.  Oh, my entire sack turned black from bruising but that’s fading and apparently totally normal; no extra pain associated with it.  The only lasting effect I have from the operation is a tiny, half-inch seam on my business, and even that will fade within about a week.

Okay, so this post was maybe a little graphic and probably more than you cared to know about my man parts, but I wanted to write it for a couple of reasons.

  1. This blarg is a chronicle not just of my writing experience but of key moments in my life, and this is most certainly that.
  2. I honestly want to encourage guys who are thinking about this to have it done.  If you’re afraid of the pain or discomfort, you shouldn’t be.  A weekend spent with a little unpleasantness in your area is far, FAR more preferable than a lifetime with extra kids you didn’t expect.
  3. To go further in that vein, compared to a female sterilization, a vasectomy is far less invasive, and has a far shorter recovery time.  The ladies have to go through childbirth and living in a man’s world after all — this is a tiny bullet you can take for your wife (and your relationship).

I may write an update in a few weeks when I’m fully recovered (I still have to be very careful if sprout wants to jump on my lap for example), but I don’t know that that’s necessary.  The surgery really was minor enough that in retrospect it hardly merits as much as I’ve written.  It really is a tiny, tiny thing even though it has huge repercussions.

Toddler Life, Chapter 128: Staying with the Grandparents

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Let me preface by saying that I love my son dearly. He is a searing beacon of joyfulness and hope and all things good, and it is my greatest aspiration that I could become half the man he seems to think I am.

But, I am probably going to kill him.

I’m not gonna lie, the kid has it rough right now (as rough as a kid who has everything he could hope for and doesn’t even have to clean up his own room yet can have it, I guess). He’s adjusting to having a baby sister in the house, which has got to be confusing for his tiny lizard brain. He’s also in that “terrible twos” stage where every snack he’s not allowed to have means he’s going to starve to death, every fun thing he’s not allowed to do means he will never have fun again ever in his life, and every moment he’s not surgically attached to my leg or my wife’s is a moment in which there is no happiness in the world (more importantly, the room) for ANYBODY. He is needy, he is demanding, he is a phenomenon of auditory wave production: he can, on demand, produce sounds that are either so loud they have no business emanating from a human who stands knee-high, or sounds that … god, how can it be described? Imagine a mosquito buzzing right next to year, and that mosquito is also scratching its nails down a chalkboard while playing a kazoo off-key and droning in some discordant minor key, “DADDY, WANT POPSICLE”. It’s a sound and a tone that makes me wish I did not have ears. How he learned to produce this tone I have no idea, but HE MUST BE STOPPED. I am sure that if the government could somehow weaponize a toddler’s whine, no military in the world would stand against us for fear of the psychological trauma that the sound can cause.

Luckily, my parents are magnanimous old souls, and they lie to me and tell me that he always behaves fantastically for them, so they agreed that he could stay with them for a night or two.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to foist my child off on his hapless grandparents. They asked for him.

But I’m not here today to write about the kid. No, I’m here to talk about a night without the kid.

Toddlers are like tiny black holes. They drift around, sucking up your energy and time, occasionally throwing toothbrushes into the toilet and sticking lollipops on the backs of the cats. (Black holes do that stuff, right? I may have gotten distracted.) But you can get used to living with just about anything. We can tune out most of his whining. We eat fast and without tasting so that we can finish our meals in less than the time it takes for him to fidget with a few pieces of broccoli and start demanding popsicles so that we can field his tantrum. We step over and around and through the messes he’s left all over the house, somehow having blinded ourselves to them, as if the entire area of the house that is less than six inches above the ground is an enormous SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem) field (thanks Douglas Adams!). That’s just our life. Every couple of days (…or every couple of weeks) we’ll clean house from all the insanity that he causes, and we live with it.

But tonight, he’s gone. And the house is so wonderfully, terribly peaceful.

There are no tantrums. No screams to go outside. No tugging and yelling to get up and play (“DON’T SIT, DADDY”). No haphazard and wanton destruction of the room: no toys strewn about, no magazines knocked in the floor, no tiny puddles of milk and juice and unidentified sticky substances underfoot.

Have our lives ever been this quiet before?

We went to dinner, my wife and I, taking sprout the second with us in her carrier. I can remember (vaguely) taking sprout the first with us to restaurants, shortly after he was born (in other words, shortly after our Life Before Children — a time so darkly lost in history it can scarcely be remembered), and thinking how stressful it was to eat out with a child. Then he grew to be a toddler and it got even worse. Now? A newborn in a carrier? We’re on vacation! We sat across from one another at dinner, enjoyed a little bit of quiet conversation, and then stopped trying to fill the void and just enjoyed the motherfargoing SILENCE.

Silence. It’s such a simple thing. You never think about it when you have it in spades. Living alone? Early married life? You can have all the silence you like, you can go crazy on it. When you have a kid — a toddler, no less — you begin to forget what silence even means. Silence might as well be Narnia. Mythical. Impossible. Imaginary. You get snippets of it — an hour while the kid naps, a blissful moment while the kid plays in quiet with a new toy, a handful of seconds after you close the door and walk around to the other side of the car — but you don’t get to enjoy it. There is no stretching of the legs, no draining of the tension in the neck, no softening and unclenching of blood vessels or anuses. You live in fear and dread of the next tantrum, the next shout, the next dropped cheerio that turns out to be the next great calamity.

We eat dinner in silence. We drive home in silence. We do the dishes, pick up some toys around the house, get ready for bed, in perfect, blissful silence. It’s glorious. Wondrous. And we miss the kid.

For all the noise and all the messes and all the noise and all the tantrums and all the noise and all the disagreeing and did I mention the noise, the house feels empty without him in it. Were our lives ever this quiet? How did we ever deal with this much quiet?

I am fighting against my basic urges. I am trying to enjoy the time without having to worry about him, without saving him from pitching himself down the stairs or from impaling his eyeball with a fork or from cracking his skull on the coffee table, without listening to his fits and his whining, but I can’t. Something in your DNA wants to have the child near even when having him near makes you want to kill him.

Thanks, mom and dad, for taking the sprout (the terror, the speaker of demands, the destroyer of rooms, the scatterer of toys) for a couple of days. Keep him as long as you want. But not too long. We miss him over here.

Just a Sec, Ty

Pavowski9 Comments

Chuck’s Flash Fiction Challenge of the week:  Bad Parents.

I struggled with this one because my parents are actually pretty good ones by virtually every yardstick I have by which to measure them.  And, you write what you know, right?  So I was stuck.  I thought about writing to the news of the week, with the guy who essentially cooked his kid alive in a car, but the thought of getting inside a mind like that turned my stomach.  Then I remembered this story which was told to me by a sweet old lady at the mall while we were chatting about my boy about a week ago.

So I decided to steal it and spruce it up.

 

Just a Sec, Ty

 

The dull hum of the food court is the roar of Fenway Park.  Tyler checks the runner, catches a signal, tips his brim with sweaty fingers and draws back.  His arm coils backward and slingshots forward, a striking serpent launching itself toward home plate.  The ball hurtles through space, its seams blurring in a wicked curling dive.

But Tyler is ready.

His hawk eyes track the ball’s impossible movement, down and away.  Like an unraveling slinky he plants, turns, swings, and connects.  The ball goes screaming away into the stratosphere, a meteor streaking through the sky, shattering the sound barrier as it sails into the night.

Tyler starts to run.

His locomotive legs pound the turf as he races for the wall, its ivy expanse stretching off on both sides.  Home run shot, no doubt about it, but only just.  The wind whistles in his ears as he sprints, looks over his shoulder, and leaps.  His legs like giant springs, he bounds into the air; an impossible leap, but he’s done it.  The momentum of his catch sends him tumbling head over heels, til he stops, flat on his back, cradling the tiny ball in his glove.  He hides it for a long moment, savoring the moment for himself.  Then he leaps to his feet, thrusting the bit of horsehide into the air.  His world erupts in a blinding spray of camera flashes.

The elderly man at table twenty-three claps and whistle at him over a plate of soggy lo mein.  “Nice play, champ,” the gentleman says, his wrinkled features pulling into a warm grin.  Tyler throws a glance over his shoulder.  She hasn’t noticed.  He trots over.

“Keep practicing,” the man says, “and you’ll be making those catches on TV one day.”

Tyler’s six-year-old eyes shine, and he pulls his two-sizes-too-big pants up at his waist.  “You think so?”

“Sure do.”

She still isn’t looking.  She missed the pitch, missed the home run swing, missed the miraculous catch.  Tyler tugs his cap straight and meanders off through the food court.  He walks past kids his age, older kids, toddlers and babies in strollers.  This one’s parents are holding both his hands and swinging him through the air, this one’s mom is licking a napkin and dabbing at her face, that one is screaming holy hell while dad pats him on the back, mumbling soothing nonsense at him.

Tyler’s feet carry him into Sears, past the shelves of shining silver appliances and the rows upon rows of brilliant television screens, until he sees it: his chariot of fire, a fully-loaded formula one racer with brand new tires and green paint, luminescent in the sun.  He jumps in, buckles his belt and helmet on, feels the engine snarl all the way down to his butt cheeks.  The checkered flag goes up and his world narrows to the road in front of him and the cars on either side, blistering past him like angry bees, roaring in his head like a rampant Tyrannosaur.

“Little boy.”

He blinks.  What’s this old lady doing on the race course?  But the cars are dissolving, his helmet is gone, and now he’s just Tyler, sitting on a shiny new John Deere lawnmower, with this janitor looking at him.  It’s concern on her face, and he doesn’t quite know what that means. All he can do is stare.

“Pretty nice driving, there.”

She’s wearing a red polo shirt, she works in the mall.  He hops off, doesn’t want to get in trouble.

“Where’s your parents?”

Tyler shrugs.  Don’t talk to strangers. 

“I followed you from the food court.  Where’s your mom?”

Another shrug, a shuffle of his feet.

“Can I help you look for her?”

Tyler looks in her eyes for the first time.  Kind eyes, like the old guy watching him hit home runs.  Like his grandmother’s, in a dim memory from when he used to visit her.  Half a lifetime ago.  She’s not dead, mom just doesn’t take him to visit anymore.  He nods and thrusts his hand out for her to hold, which she does.  Her hand is dry and warm and big, and her fingers close around his and he feels safe.

She’s still on the playground, amidst the raucous toddlers and kindergartners and first graders, seated on a bench at the back, next to a plastic padded mushroom.  She doesn’t look up.  Her fingers fly across the face of the little black device in her hands, her face free of any emotion.

“Mom!”  Tyler runs to her, hugs her knee.

“Just a sec, Ty.”  Click click click click.

The janitor clears her throat.  “Excuse me, miss?”

Click click.  “Hmm?”

“Just thought you ought to know I brought your boy back from Sears.”

Mom looks up.  “What?”  She glares at Tyler.  “Is that true?”

Tyler’s face flushed and he stares at his shoes.  The woman in the red shirt kneels next to him and puts a hand on his shoulder.  “He was all right.  Driving him a race car.  But I thought he ought to be getting back to you.”  She gives Mom a stern look.

Mom snatches Tyler’s hand and pulls him away.  “I don’t need you to touch my son.”

Mom yanks him out of the playground, and tears spring into his eyes.  Tyler throws a glance backward at the janitor and thinks he sees tears sparkling in her eyes, too.  But then his mom’s hand isn’t a hand at all.  It’s a thick, ropey vine, and the jungle is singing around him as he swings through the trees, dodging the legs of passersby like so many tree trunks in the wilderness flashing by.

A momentary distraction as Mom’s voice breaks through the vision: “wouldn’t believe what just happened to me, the nerve of this woman…” and Tyler’s heart lifts, because he knows now she’ll be talking about him all day.