Thursdays with Fang

God do I love my Thursdays. Only two deadlines to hit, and easy ones; practically a day off!

And the rest of the day is all about kickin’ it white-trash style (usually involving Big Box Store shopping sprees and chain restaurant lunch destinations) with The Boy, who takes the day off from daycare to slum it with the Old Man. It’s like a weekly check-in with the state of his childhood. And it’s always a revelation.

This morning he said to me, in a patient tone of voice, “Let me finish this first, okay?” (I was talking bath and he was talking “Monsters, Inc.”)

What’s remarkable isn’t that he didn’t want to take a bath, it’s that he declined my offer with a complete sentence that included a reasonable counter-proposal. I’m sure it’s a perfectly normal little milestone and ought not be any great source of pride, but it was so cool to be fobbed off by my son just as one guy to another. It actually did buy him the time he asked for, I was so pleased.

About a half hour later, he walked into my office covered head to toe in the red, white and blue streamers we had only just taken down from last week’s election party, looking like some unraveling patriotic mummy. It was all fun and games till I noticed that his mouth was also smeared red and blue. “Did you put this stuff in your mouth?” I demanded. He admitted that he had and we spent a while in the bathroom cleaning up and talking about stuff to eat that’s bad for you, like anything that isn’t food but stains your mouth red and blue.

I decided to step away from the computer shortly thereafter and take in the second half of the movie with him. He came out of his zombie-tv-stare and started talking about the events in the film, then he started building a very architecturally sound Lego skyscraper – Howard Roark would have approved of his Spartan, form-follows-function aesthetic – before pushing it over and kicking the Legos enthusiastically around the room for about ten minutes.

A trip to the park down the street followed after the movie ended. Neither one of us knows what to say to the other parents and kids we find there. The Boy is kind of shy with new people, and I fit the profile of Creepy Single Man With Child In Park In The Middle Of The Day so I don’t even try. I smile, I speak only when spoken to, I make sure none of the other kids are in the background of any of the photos I’m taking of The Boy… There are rules when you fit a profile, and you stray from them at your peril!

Anyway, he’s gained a lot of gumption since the last time we went stag to the park. Hitting the high slides first instead of working up to them, and then turning around and climbing the slide back to its top. It’s one of them long high twisty ones and it scared the crap out of me the first time he did it. He wanted to go on all the gizmos even the spinny ones and I swung him on the swings till again I was scared crapless and he was whooping with joy. I kept stopping him to ask, “Okay, you done yet?” “Again!” And away he went. Part of me squirmed at the metaphor I was acting out of pushing my son away every time he came close to me. I knew I was overthinking things, but I’m making a concerted effort to pay attention to The Boy’s childhood as it flies by, and sometimes that spills over into overthinking.

We came back home and I made us a lunch of Safeway Meat Loaf and Green Giant frozen corn kind of mixed up like a stew. We ate it while watching the only “South Park” episode I’ve seen in years that would be fit to watch with a three-year-old, parodying the “High School Musical” phenomenon. Had a lot of fresh pineapple after that then watched some “Superman” cartoons together in my office while I hit one of my deadlines. After that, it was nothing but nap (for him, not me).

I mentioned he’s tentative around new people. A little backward socially, perhaps, even. You know who he has mad game for? His babysitters. One’s over right now and their peals of laughter could power all of Monstropolis well into the next century. He just came running in breathlessly, Superman cape flapping out behind him. “Daddy, come on!! Stacy’s here!!” The message clearly being, I’m a fool if I don’t get in on some of this Stacy excitement. He’s a charming bastard when it serves his purposes.

Anyhow, I know these are the kind of details my mind will soon purge to make room for, say, the track listings of Rush’s new live CD/DVD set (and the setlist differences between formats therein) or something equally useless, so I’m taking a few minutes tonight to write Future Fang a reminder of how much we used to love Thursdays when The Boy was still a boy and everything was Mountain Dew and roses.