Perfect Date
Yesterday, he and I were reunited. After a long week apart, I looked into his eyes.
“You’re so handsome.”
Without missing a beat, he replied, “You’re so beautiful.”
A week ago, I had taken him on a date. We started with fresh-squeezed lemonade (a favorite). Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but we both like the pulp.
I knew where he wanted to go next. Unfortunately, I hadn’t planned on it.
“Sorry,” I told him, “we’re not going to Menards.”
He pouted, but only for a moment. Instead, we walked across the street to a little mom-and-pop hardware store. The moment we stepped inside, his eyes lit up.
“Oh! I like this!”
The shop was small, and we wandered down the narrow aisles into the plumbing section, lined with PVC pipe, brass fittings, copper elbows, hose clamps, bins of mysterious fasteners, and enough nuts and bolts to hold together a modest-sized fort.
He was utterly alight, giddy, animated, bopping from one shelf to the next.
The shopkeeper, an elderly gentleman with kind blue eyes, a shock of white hair combed neatly to one side, a navy seersucker button-down shirt, khaki pants, and well-worn leather loafers, walked over.
“How can I help you?”
“Oh,” I said, “we’re just looking around. We’re not after anything in particular.”
My son interrupted.
“It’s our first time at this hardware store! We’re on a date—the perfect date.”
Laughter reached the man’s eyes before it escaped his mouth.
He held out his hand.
“Young man, it’s a pleasure to meet you. You’re my kind of boy. I’m Ramon.”
Ramon led him to the front counter, offered him a caramel, and asked him thoughtful questions about his handyman ambitions.
My son decided he needed supplies to build a box.
“What will the box be for?” I asked.
He thought for a moment.
“I don’t know.”
A pause.
“Anything.”
Another pause.
“Everything.”
We left with a spring, four wheels, assorted lengths of PVC pipe, a magnifying glass, and a handful of screws.
I’m still not entirely sure what sort of box those supplies will produce, but when he hugged me afterward and said, “Thank you so much! This was the perfect date, Mom,” it was worth considerably more than the twenty dollars I spent.
Last night we finally had a chance to catch up on the week. He told me about the assortment of knickknacks and conversation starters he’d built. He also wrote his first short story. The prompt was to invent a constellation.
Astronomy.
It sparked an idea.
A Bedtime Story
Once upon a time, there was a fish, and the fish was lonely. So, he needed a friend, so he went to go get a friend in the deeper waters. He found a friend, another fish! The first fish's name was Bob. The friend's name was Fred. They both wanted another friend. So, they went into the deeper waters.
They found a shark. They asked the shark if he wanted to be friends, and the shark just opened its mouth and started chasing them even deeper. So, they got scared off by the shark. The shark's like, "I don't wanna chase them for a fish pie." So, he went back to his house.
Then the little fish kept swimming and saw a cave in the really deep waters, and they went in it. It wasn't a cave underwater, it was an octopus's cave! So, the octopus chased them. Then, all of a sudden, the octopus saw a jellyfish. Then the octopus goes, "aaaahh!" The octopus was scared of jellyfish. So, the octopus knew he could only reach one of the little fish. Bob went down so that the octopus would be distracted away from Fred. The octopus got Bob.
The ocean said that the sacrifice Bob made was so good that the ocean just took him away from the octopus before he could hurt him while he was in his tentacles. Bob wanted to be a constellation instead. The ocean made him disappear, and then stardust fell. The octopus was like, "Mmmmm?" and in octopus that means, "oh well." And he went back to his cave. And if you look up into the sky, you'll see a fish.
The end.