danny, the champion of the world

Mia has a habit of denuding plants. She stands in front of a bush and strips off leaves, her fist clamped around a branch like she’s stripping wires. It’s a mostly harmless habit, except that it tends to leave our patio littered with detritus from our Japanese boxwoods, and it tends to leave our Japanese boxwoods a little less boxy. 

I’ve told her to stop enough times – sometimes in elevated tones – and the message finally sank in. This morning, she and Max were on the patio, playing with some boxwood leaves, and she turned to me and explained that she’d found those leaves – she didn’t take them off the bush, so I shouldn’t be mad. I decided to take the opportunity to paint some gray shades, explaining that the prohibition on picking leaves is not absolute. If you’re going to use the leaves, that’s fine, I said – but you can’t just stand there and pull them off because it’s fun to pull them off. “Sometimes it’s fine to pull the leaves,” I began, before Max stepped in helpfully to finish the sentence.

“If you don’t see us,” he said. “If you don’t see us do it, we can do it. Right?”

Mia brought home a bean sprout that became a bean plant, and that inspired us. So we planted forget-me-nots, and marigolds, and poppies. And chives and cilantro, and something else that I forgot to label, and since it never took, just like the flowers never took, I’ll never know what it was.

We’re learning.

And then we planted cucumbers in a big bowl, and they thrived, and then our gardener told me to take them out of the bowl and put them in the ground, which I did, over near the front of the house, behind the wall, near the apricot tree, and they struggled in the 100-degree heat, but made it through, until sometime between yesterday morning and this morning, when a squirrel, or maybe a team of squirrels – probably tweaker squirrels – came and ate them. All but one. Which will probably be gone by morning.

Damn tweaker squirrels.

Also: We went on a hike, and we brought along Max’s cowlick.

Someone jacked my identity again. Well, maybe not my identity, but my credit card’s identity, and really, what’s the difference? And not “again,” technically, since the last time it was Sarah, but since I’m the guy who spent quality time on the phone with collections, well, I feel entitled. 

Anyway, this time doesn’t look so bad – someone up in Washington (damn tweakers) bought about a thousand dollars worth of stuff from Toys R Us, and Amex called me, and I told them no, and we’re good, I think. But if not, if things go bad, we should be alright anyway.

When I hung up with Amex, Mia asked what the call was about, and I explained that it was the bank, and that someone had bought something with our money, and that the bank was fixing it. To which Max responded, “Daddy, it’s okay, because me and Mia, we still have plenty of money.” So that’s comforting.

Also: Max was naked from the waist down when he said this, so take it for what it’s worth.

Thursday was Mia’s first science fair, and mine too, at least that I can remember, and so we crushed some eggs to celebrate. Other kids made volcanoes and grew lettuce and fussed with magnets, and one kid extracted DNA from an onion, which his mother insists is not really that difficult, but she’s a biochemist. Someone even took bacteria samples from around campus and let them get fuzzy in Petri dishes, and the results were sufficiently horrifying that Sarah could barely stand to look at the pictures, but that was a second-grader, I think, and those kids are smart. Us? We crushed eggs. And loved it.

It was more than it sounds, and maybe less. We put a cookie sheet on a two-by-four and rested one end of it on a raw egg (free-range, if that matters, which it doesn’t) encased in play-doh to keep it upright. Then we started piling books on top, one by one – first Mia the Beach Cat, then Goodnight Max, then 10 Little Rubber Ducks. By the time we got to Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book, the egg was clearly scared, and when we slid Once Upon a Princess on top, gentle like a maternity nurse, the whole thing came crashing down, yolk and whites and shell heading for separate exits.

It sounds like fun and it was – fun and edifying and surprising, since who knew that the same 9.2 pounds of children’s books, stacked in the same order under the same conditions, would crush an egg whether it was standing upright or laying sideways? Certainly not Mia, who pointed out that the horizontal egg should be easier to smash “because it’s already a little flat,” and anyway, everyone knows the shell is thinner around the fat middle. I, for one, thought she was right on the money. We were both wrong.