“Houston, we have a problem…”

So I go to pick up The Boy from preschool the other day. I forget to bring my glasses, but it’s no big deal. I just need them to read or do up-close work. Picking The Boy up from preschool doesn’t require any paperwork.

So I get there and as usual he’s happy to see me, but he doesn’t want to divulge anything about what has gone on in his life that day before I arrived. He’s got absolutely nothing to say about it. Won’t even admit to knowing any of the other kids’ names, even though he’s been there more than a month.

And he’s pretty good with names, at least where it comes to super-heroes.

I see a pile of cut up, painted paper grocery bags on the floor, like the one he’s wearing above, and I ask him about them. The teacher yells something about how they went to the moon and that now he was Astronaut The Boy, not just The Boy.

“So you went to the moon?” I ask him. I’m spoon-feeding him the answers for Christ’s sake and he just turns his head and pulls at my hand.

A little blonde girl, maybe 3 or 4, rushes up and begins to explain the whole situation in elaborate detail complete with dramatic gestures and digressions and mispronunciations. It was like a scene straight out of Hollywood. Unfortunately, the explanation kind of got lost in the execution and eventually the scene began to drag...

Finally I wave her to silence and I say something like, “I see. Each one of you made one of the ‘helmets’ and he’s supposed to take his home, right?”

No, no, no, that wasn’t it, I didn’t have it right. She was getting frustrated with me. I took another look at the pile of tarted-up grocery bags and they all had a face-hole cut in them and the face-holes all had writing under them. Name tags.

I picked one up and showed it to her. “See,” I explained patiently, squinting to read the name written in under this example’s face-hole, “This one belongs to someone named, uh, NASA…”