It was a good Sunday here in the barn. We had a good time laying low and resting for the week ahead. But throughout the day, my children made a string of questionable decisions. I’m tempted to blame it on their mother, but taking a closer look, I’m afraid that I have no one but myself to blame.
August, for example, when offered a bath, refused to use the tub and opted for an approach that he found far more efficient.
As for my own problematic bathing habits, apparently, I do not head to the showers as quickly as I ought to after a run. I was sitting innocently, enjoying a glass of water after yesterday’s run when Alden walked by and pronounced without affect, “You smell awful, Papa.”
She may have been right, but what about a man’s feelings?
The day of ill-advised happenings continued as August discovered to his delight and my dismay that he, too, can climb the cat tower.
I quickly helped him down, at which point he scurried into this cardboard box we had used to bring the groceries home from Costco. This seemed harmless enough.
Until his sister forcibly evicted him, grabbed her monkey, and moved in.
There is, apparently, no better place to take an afternoon nap.
Meanwhile, August had scaled yet another tower, and was taking in his lunch. Apparently, hot dogs and American cheese are best enjoyed with one’s feet in the air.
I suppose in a house where a man does not bathe, his children feel free to employ libertine eating techniques.
In the final stroke of afternoon madness, Kato requested that I take down the “rocket book.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I went over to his bookshelf to have a look. I was quickly directed away from the kids’ shelf and to the shelf where I keep my favorite books from college. The “rocket book,” apparently, was the companion guide to Gravity’s Rainbow, an endless, dense postmodern epic set in WWII Europe against a backdrop of disillusionment and dismantling of traditional structures of meaning creation—or so suggested a young Matthew Swanson when writing his honors thesis on said tome in the spring of 1997.
Kato seems uninterested in encyclopedic narrative, or the advent of postwar secularism, but he sure does like the drawings of the rockets on the cover.
Whatever it takes to encourage the early establishment of good reading habits, I say.