“Hey mom, can I ask you a hypothetical question?”
This is Jack’s way of introducing a subject he thinks might provoke a strong response.
He’s also driving. I’m his passenger. The smart thing to do would be to say no. No questions.
But this isn’t the blog you come to for exceptional parenting advice from someone who thinks things through before speaking. If you’ve been here any length of time, you probably know where this is going.
“Hmmm?” I say.
“What would you say about my getting a tattoo?”
Chip, scrape, chip, chip scrape.
Morning.
The early winter sky a brilliant blue.
Sun reflects shimmery on white, blinding me.
Chip, scrape, chip, chip scrape.
It was a little thing.
And then the next to follow the first. Both little.
One cover-up leading, as it will, to another.
Chip, scrape, chip, chip scrape.
Two brothers, give or take six hours between school and bedtime, so many things to fight about.
Things like:
Who gets shotgun on the ride home.
Who got it last time.
Who had it all last week, for crissake.
Who left the empty Cheetos bag in the back seat for someone else to clean up (righteous indignation being best expressed by flinging said Cheetos bag into the way back – indicating that mom apparently is the “someone else”).
Mike and I were at a reception last week for a woman who would deliver the keynote address at a conference the next day. The conference chair and her husband were telling us that our guest of honor had found a note in her room from the hotel manager apologizing in advance for the concert that would be happening that night in the adjacent arena.
“What kind of crazy thing do you think they have going on there?” The woman remarked.
We knew. It was a national music festival, billing itself as 150,000 watts of bass crunch, from a brand of noise they say is so intense “you can touch in the air.” It’s the kind of music Jack and all his friends have been talking about. Dubstep. Electro house hip-hop.
And, I kid you not one freaking bit, the concert promoter recommends earplugs.
Doesn’t that sound just so outrageously awesome awful?
Anyway, we happened to know about it because that’s where we’d dropped our 15 year-old off on the way to the reception.
I have never been able to get in and out of a Best Buy in fewer than three hours, and without having fended off at least half a dozen sales guys and fielded offers of enough warrantees and insurance to nearly double the cost of whatever I’m buying. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that experience is not unique to me.
I would have rather driven toothpicks under my nails than go on Tuesday, except as I was flying by on the freeway after picking up Jack, I realized he had yet to buy his brother a birthday present for his party the next day.
Colin doesn’t ask for much. He barely even talked about his birthday except when prodded, and then asked his brother specifically for a pair of gaming headphones.
That’s it.
We refer to the shopping mall and everything in a two-mile radius as The Heart of Darkness. That includes the mall proper, and any ancillary chain restaurants, big box movie theaters, massive sporting goods stores and other bastions of excess, harbingers of societal ruin, and brokers of chintzy, mass-produced-on-an-assembly-line crapola.
A Lamborghini will run a person anywhere from $200k to $4.5 million, which is totally news to me, but not to Jack who seems to have moved on from an obsession with video games, set in post apocalyptic zombie land, to a more expensive, but still fantasy-based hobby.
He’s also a fan of the Corvette and the Ferrari. He says when he starts making money he’ll buy me a Porsche. I tell him I don’t need a Porsche. I’m rockin’ a 2007 Prius with the door ding in the passenger side where Colin hit a cement post once while getting out of the car at school.
When we bought the Prius, I took my shiny, red, Acura with the sunroof to the consignment car lot. I cried a little bit. It just wasn’t a good mommy car.
This month Jack is schlepping around, looking for someone who will hire a fifteen year old with no experience. He has very high standards. Nothing in food service, or with pets, kids or yardwork. He’d like full time with a little more than minimum wage.
Something having to do with playing video games all day would be ideal.
Remember your first job? How about your first few? At Jack’s age, I was still babysitting people’s horribly behaved children for about a buck an hour and pilfering whatever goodies they stocked in their cupboards. I also walked dogs and cleaned pools.
There were okay jobs and there were less than okay jobs.
Then there were the truly extraordinary …
We’ve kind of plateaued in Jack’s half marathon training.
And by ‘plateaued,’ I mean stopped in our tracks.
You knew this was going to happen, right? Fourteen year old says: “I want to run a half marathon,” he doesn’t mean: I want to run for weeks and months for what seems to be no particular reason. I want to run in the chilly, early morning, in the sleet that shouldn’t be happening in April but still does, or in the freak heat wave that saps all my energy.
I want to run even when I worry that this lingering cough is from an impending plague rather than just allergies, or there’s a crink in my knee that could mean I’m working on a stress injury. I want to run on bleeding blisters, with toenails falling off and chafing in places I didn’t know could chafe.
I want to run through wardrobe malfunctions and sunscreen in my eyes and gastrointestinal distress.
Jack, who will be 15 in May, wants a summer job.
He tells me that if he can get something full time at an $8 hourly rate, he’ll save up enough for a new computer and a PS4. I don’t know where all this stuff will go, since the family room (man cave) is pretty much already full of electronics.
I guess we could get rid of the foosball table. And the couch. Maybe knock out a wall or two (note to Jack: I mean that satirically. We are not knocking down a wall to accommodate more electronics).
I remember wandering around downtown when I was his age, stepping into little mom and pop stores, in which I’d never shopped, asking if they needed summer help. After about three or four rejections, I stopped asking and just window shopped.
