I've finished reading the bedtime story to the three youngest—my fourth, I think, and final time through The Lord of the Rings, he said sadly—and I finish with the family ritual my late, great brother John introduced me to, which is asking each of the kids to say something good about their day; Johnny had his boys list three things each, I believe, but I've got way more kids, and their lives are apparently exponentially less rich, because they sometimes struggle to come up with a single good thing about their day. (To be fair, if I allowed The Brawn to list video game-related stuff, he'd never have any problem listing a dozen good things about his day.)
They each cough up a good thing about their day, and then Max—who's taken to sitting in on our evening's reads–adds hers. I call into the blue room (which isn't blue) to ask Bean for her good thing about the day, as usual, and she chimes in. I don't bother asking the Rose, because although I can't see her, she's always got headphones on at this time of night and can't hear us anyway.
As we're wrapping up, the Brawn does something that annoys the Golden Weasel. "Please don't," she says, the words polite, the tone sharp, and although I didn't see what happened, I saw her twist her body in a way that would indicate he'd probably poked her in the back with a toe.
It's late, I don't feel like getting into it, since I'm heading downstairs and he's about to sleep and she's going to sweep the first floor, so I push the parental guidance off for a future date, another day, hopefully when his mother's on duty. But without even really thinking about it, I find myself humming the bassline to MC Hammer's best-known song (said bassline, of course, having been...let's say "borrowed" from Rick James).
Suddenly, from the blue comes a surprising voice yelling "Can't touch this!"
There's a stunned silence as we process what just happened.
Then I yell at the Rose, "You can hear us?!"
There's another pause, briefer this time, then she bursts laughing. "Four years of pretending I couldn't hear you so I didn't have to come up with a good thing of the day down the drain! 'Can't Touch This' is just too powerful!"
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