Last night for Valentine’s Day, I came home to this.

Anthony had earned some money burning CDs for friends and had ordered flowers for me at school. This involved at least 2-3 weeks of planning on his part.

He said after school yesterday, he and Evan walked to the drug store to buy a card, but the store was closed.

So they came home and painted cards for me with model car paint.

Don’t tell him I told y’all what a sweetheart he is.

Saturday night at the hotel, I thought it’d be fun to pull my boys and their cousins away from the Nintendo for half an hour to play Spoons (the card game, not the musical utensils).

From the way they protested at being “unplugged,” you’d have thought I was disconnecting them from life support. Before we could start, though, I had to find a deck of cards. I went down to the front desk and borrowed a rumpled, tattered-looking deck, and as I stepped into the elevator to go back upstairs, I twisted the rubber band off the cards and started counting to make sure I had a full deck (please keep your comments to yourself). Some of the backs were blue, some were red. Some of the cards were Bicycle, and some were Hoyle. When I looked at their faces, I found that I had 8 aces, 8 kings, 8 queens, 8 jacks, 8 tens, 8 nines and nothing else. My brother said it looked like a double-euchre deck. I brought it back to the front desk, because with those cards, one round of Spoons would be over in 5 seconds.

A few minutes later, I remembered that I had a container of Umbra cards in my car. Obviously, I bought these cards for their nifty oval form (see fig. 1) and NOT their functionality, because I soon discovered that the kids couldn’t figure out how to hold them, and the shape of the deck made it impossible to shuffle. Just as we were going to give up on the whole Spoons thing, my dad remembered that he had a couple of decks in his briefcase, and they weren’t euchre or Umbra cards, thank goodness.

Once I showed the boys how to play the game, they ate it up. I kept wishing out loud that we had more people to play, because as you may know, this game is the most fun when the huge mad scramble for spoons leaves a pile of bodies on the floor along with one or two casualties.

Good times.

Anthony started begging my mom to join, promising that we wouldn’t tackle HER during any scrambles. First, he pestered her with a simple “please-please-please, Grandma.” Then he teased her with various guilt trips: “Don’t you love your grandsons? What kind of grandma would not want to play Spoons with her grandchildren? We’ll be SO SAD if you don’t play, Grandma.” Right on cue, the other boys looked at her with sad, puppy-dog faces.

THEN during one break in the game, Anthony jumped up, struck a theatrical pose, and made a speech à la Return of the King: “A day may come when grandmothers and grandsons no longer play cards together, but it is not this day. An evening, when we sit around doing nothing, but it is not this evening. Tonight, we play!” We all burst out laughing, and oh man, he was just getting warmed up. As we passed cards around the circle, I could see the wheels turning in his head. As soon as one round ended, he would jump up and make another movie-inspired speech:

à la Star Wars: “It is unavoidable, Grandma. Join us. It is your destiny.”

à la Star Trek (I think?): “Resistance is futile. You WILL become one of us.”

à la Finding Nemo: “Grandmother of the blue and white, you have been called forth to the top of Mt. Wannahockaloogie to join in the fraternal bonds of… spoonhood.”

By this point, my mom was almost crying with laughter, and still refusing to play, just so we could hear the lines Anthony came up with next:

à la Shrek: “C’mon, this’ll be fun, Grandma! We’ll stay up late, swapping spoonly stories, and in the morning… I’m makin’ WAFFLES.”

And then finally, he put an arm around her, gestured toward us, and said, “They may take our spoons, Grandma, but they will never take… our FREEEEEDOM.”

That kid will go far in improv. I would have never been so quick with the lines… they would have come to me in the middle of the night or a day later, long after the moment had passed.

My mom finally relented. She was too weak from laughing to resist any longer.

My two boys had their tonsils removed yesterday. We were at the Primghar hospital from 6:00a.m. to 7:30p.m. Things went well, for the most part, but we can never do anything without some complications or excitement.

Anthony’s bed pinched an electrical cord just a few minutes after he returned from the OR. The room went dark. Sparks, smoke, panic. He and his bed were wheeled out into the hall, just as he was coming out from under anesthesia, wild, disoriented, flailing around, tangling himself up in all the tubes and cords. His IV kinked up, and he had to be stuck again for a new one.

Two hours later, Evan came out of the OR snoring louder than I’ve ever heard him snore. Anthony, who has been aggravated to no end by this snoring, sat up and cried out in despair, “That’s HIM? He’s STILL snoring??” When Evan began to wake up, I stepped out of the room for 5 minutes, feeling like I’d been in the way all morning. When I returned, he was crying this hoarse, heart-wrenching cry, and 3 nurses were holding him down. He had pulled his IV out. As they stuck him 3 more times looking for a vein, he wailed, “I want my tonsils back in!”

The surgeon said their tonsils had been enormous, and Evan’s had been larger than Anthony’s. Later that afternoon, a nurse brought them into the room in a container. I don’t remember much after that.

The boys are doing pretty well now, although they’ll never want to see another popsicle again after this. I stayed home from work. They’re a little cranky, mostly because of the 3 different kinds of nasty medicine they have to take, but they’re already bright-eyed and smiling again.

When I was ten, I used to climb every tree in the neighborhood, but my favorite was a fir that stood at one corner of my parents’ old, 2-story house. Its boughs brushed the windows of my corner bedroom on the second floor.

When you pulled yourself up to the lowest limb, you entered an airy cathedral of arching wood and dappled light. Thick, sturdy branches encircled the trunk like a spiral staircase, and reaching the top of the tree was more of a leisurely hike than a knee-scraping climb. The very tip-top of the tree was far above the house, and a person could see for miles. I would sit cradled between two branches and lose myself in books for hours. Once or twice, I took out a penknife and inscribed my initials next to those of a boy I liked. Other times, I used the knife to draw out beads of sticky sap from the skin of the tree. My little sister made the climb a couple of times, but it was my tree, my sanctuary. It was such a perfect, beautiful tree.

My ten-year-old has inherited my (former) penchant for heights. He has built wooden platforms in two of the trees in our yard, and yesterday, he called out to me from the tip-top of one of the fir trees. I had to tilt my head way back to see him waving at me from among the branches. When he climbed down, he grabbed my hand and pointed out how thick and sturdy the branches were, how like a staircase they were, and I knew he had found a perfect, beautiful tree. But to me, the branches didn’t look sturdy enough, and the tree looked twice as tall as the one I had climbed without a care when I was ten.

I try not to temper his exhilaration with motherly fears, but as I watch him scramble up through the branches like a squirrel, so small and quick, I wonder how my parents coped with that sick, scared feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when your child climbs to such dizzying heights. I want to keep him grounded, in every sense of the word, but I also want to see him climb.

2001

It began innocently enough. I had been waiting in the school parking lot for the kids to return from their field trip, waiting and doing a slow burn while another parent let his musically-inclined toddler play the car horn for 30 interminable minutes.

Be-beep, beeeeeeeeep! I had an out-of-body moment where I envisioned my braver second self stomping up to his car, grabbing a fistful of shirt, and saying in a quiet, deadly, flinty, Clint-y voice: “Do. You. Mind.”

Just before I descended into madness [further], the school bus rumbled up, the kids tumbled out, and my oldest clambered into the passenger seat next to me, breathless. I had given him $10 to buy snacks and souvenirs, and he had spent most of it on a pair of blue spangley bangley earrings for me, crafted by a Native American artisan. While I tried to put them in and drive at the same time, he told me about his day. They had visited a national monument and an historic Native American site, but what engaged his thoughts now was a vintage tonsil cutter, seen at a dusty little museum along the way. “Man, that thing was sinister-looking, Mom!”

I smiled to see him flexing his vocabulary muscles, and he went on to explain how this torture device worked: “The dentist loops one metal ring around the tonsil and jabs into it with this little fork piece and pulls back on this lever and then this Gillette blade slices that thing outta there!” We both shuddered. Good luck bringing him in for a tonsillectomy sometime down the road, I thought.

“Your tonsils are that little wiggly thing that hangs down in the back of your mouth, right?” he asked, “Like that Cingular commercial with the cowboy who sings opera and all you see at the end are his tonsils wiggling?” (It’s a view that gives me the creeps, by the way.)

I shook my head. “No, your tonsils are back on either side, ‘ight ‘ack ‘ere,” I said, taking both hands off the wheel and sticking two fingers into my mouth in a poorly conceived visual aid. “That little wiggly bit is your uvula.”

“Oh.” He pondered that for a minute. Then, “So that’s what Drew Carey was talking about when he said some girl licked his uvula!”

I was afraid to know what he had imagined a uvula to be, and I made a mental note to speak to his father regarding age-appropriate television viewing for 9 year olds.

I drove in silence for a couple of miles, unaware that the worst was yet to come. He straightened up. “Mom, when do I start french kissing?”

Ouch. Think quick, Ma.

Hoping humor would deflect his attack, I teased him. “You mean you haven’t already?”

He made an awful face, and I was somewhat relieved to see that he was thoroughly grossed out by the idea. But then he asked, “When was your first kiss?”

“Boy, I ain’t telling you,” I grumbled, suddenly not in the mood for this conversation.

He let that slide in his eagerness to ask his next shocking question: “So,” he grinned. “When do I get my first hickey?”

I stammered and sputtered, caught off guard. “BO-uh,” I said (my artificial Southern accent tends to come out during times of stress), “Ah don’t need t’be seein’ any hickies on your neck ’til you’re at least 40!”

Then he asked me if I had ever had a hickey.

… (beat skipped here)

Recalling that this was the kid who was still puzzled by womankind’s collective aversion to a certain punctuation mark (courtesy of tv commercials complaining about periods), I resolved to be open and honest about all such fowl, bumbly matters from that point on: “YES,” I said, gritting my teeth.

Then he peppered me with questions: “How many? What do they look like? How do you get them?”

Reluctantly, I told him that I had had a few (“but a long time ago”), and that they look like purple bruises, and they’re made by sucking. He immediately proceeded to suck and slurp, first on his knee, and then his inner arm, with no success, thank goodness. Then he stopped mid-slurp and asked, “Did you ever give Dad any?”

A primitive tonsil extraction would have been preferable to answering these questions. And he hasn’t even begun to ask the tough ones.

Spring 2001