Tête à Tête

A young girl sitting at the table next to us made Charlie cry. Charlie and I were sitting in a booth that spanned the width of one end of the dining room. Jill sat opposite us in a bamboo framed chair. The little girl had blue eyes and sandy blonde hair pulled into a pigtail at the crown of her head. She wore a pink top. Her mother made small talk with Jill. I buttered bread.

"Tell me it gets better." The woman demanded.

"I think it gets worse and then it gets better." Jill said. The woman took a drink of wine.

Charlie wielded a grownup fork in each hand and stood on his knees with his bottom resting on his heels. They must seat families near one another in restaurants so couples on dates are not disturbed. I don't care for the seating in this establishment. The spacing is too close together. I don't like my sides to be vulnerable. But the seating facilitates eavesdropping. An Asian couple sat on the other side of me. They were quiet.

Our waitress was Katie. Her hair was in a bun. The Asian man told Katie his entrée was great. He told her loud enough for me to hear him. He did not speak with an accent.

The woman Jill was speaking to, pulled the little girl from her high chair and set her on the ground. She sauntered over to Grandma, who was seating next to Charlie. Grandma picked her up and put her in the booth. She bobbled over to Charlie.

"Oh! She wants to say hi!" Mother said. Everyone thought this was really cute except for me and Charlie.

"Charlie can you say hi?" Jill said.

"Charlie, put your forks on the table," I said.

Charlie laid his forks down. The little girl rushed in on him and began scratching his cheek. I had disarmed him. Oh, the guilt. Defenseless, Charlie cried.

"Oh, no don't do that!" Grandma said.

"Oh, I am so sorry!" Mother said.

"She didn't mean to hurt you." Jill said.

Grandma imprisoned the little girl between her and the wall.

Katie delivered the check to the Asian couple.

The mother guzzled the last of her red wine and returned the glass to the table holding the slender stem. Jill took Charlie into her lap to sooth him.

After dinner we all took a trip to the bathroom together. Charlie went with Jill.

Jill has to go as much as I do now. The other night, she showed me an artists' cutaway of a pregnant woman's torso.

"I wondered where everything went." She marveled.

I took a look for myself. It is true. It is amazing to see the body make room for this temporary guest. The growing baby displaces the internal organs. She tells some days this baby is standing on her bladder.

Leaving the bathroom, I felt the whoosh of air as Charlie ran by headed for the restaurant dining room. He paid me no notice.

Thirty seconds later the air pressure throughout the entire restaurant dropped as the door to the women's bathroom flung open and Jill rushed out. Her face was red.

Charlie, proud of himself, giggled and ran in place. Realizing what had happened, that Charlie had broken free from the stall while Jill was still it in it, made me, as the casual observer, laugh inside.

"Don't you ever do that again!" Jill said.

Once in a while, I don't mind watching someone else chasing after Charlie.

 

"Charlie, we don't touch other peoples' mailboxes." Charlie's weight falls back on his heels. His arms rest at his sides. He eyes me indignantly as I make up the ten yards he has pulled ahead of me on the sidewalk.

A swarm of gnats hovers into the air space in front of my face. I disturb their formation with a hand swipe.

"But I want to!" Charlie protests.

I feel compelled to explain my reasoning. "It's a Federal crime."

Charlie is mute the next few carefully placed steps down the sidewalk past the black mailbox. Hammering sounds emerge from a house up the street.

"It's a Federal CRIME," he says drawing out the term crime. A narrow rivulet has appeared where the sidewalk meets the road, the result of a poorly aimed sprinkler head.

"It's a FEDERAL crime," he repeats with an emphasis on the word federal.

"We don't touch other peoples' MAIL-boxes." Charlie continues with his head down. A car speeds up the hill. The driver sees us and slows. Charlie stops.

"Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"It's a Federal crime to touch other peoples' mailboxes."

"Yeah. I know."

Zero percent down and no payments for a year

Charlie scribbled on our fitted yellow 100% Egyptian cotton bed sheets with a black ink pen this morning. Jill was taking a phone call behind the closed door of our home office. I was "resting" in a sleeping bag down in the basement next to the tent cot. My sleeping is what Charlie knows as resting.

We had been on a safari. This means we turned out the basement lights, Charlie crawled up on my back while I took him on a horseback safari adventure. We encountered dinosaurs and cows, frogs, polar bears and bald eagles. We came across a prairie dog town which we were forced to bulldoze in order to break ground on a new safari tourist hotel. Since the groundbreaking only had taken place today for the new accommodations, we were left with only one option -to camp in the chilly night air. Surrounded by a wolf pack whose glowing eyes were as numerous as the holes in the pegboard which the previous owner of the house decided would look good to finish a basement with, we could only pray for morning light and hope above all hopes that the fire would keep the wolves from devouring us.

The cover of the blinding darkness emboldened all the ugly creatures. We listened to clicking, buzzing, slithering, tapping, traipsing, humming, dripping, and howling sounds. Somewhere, miles above in the top of a muzzle tree, nested a pair of howler monkeys whose thundering voices sounded like bickering spouses. Gloating over the whole of the forest above was a magnificent moon. A coyote moon. H.W., the juvenile howler monkey, disappeared into the forest canopy unbeknownst to his parents. He joined the Aye-Aye several trees away who was too busy looking for grubs to give H.W. the time of night. With the aid of his prehensile tail, H.W. swung from branch to branch. He felt alive as the damp air whooshed past his face and flattened his fur against his body.

"Never again am I coming back to this muggy hell. I am going to the city!"

H.W. found his way to the coast, where he stowed away aboard a Norwegian Cruise Ship on a course to San Diego. Eventually, he came to Des Moines where he became the activities director for an assisted living community.

Jill yelped when she saw the graffiti on the bed sheet. Charlie and I scrambled to the scene.

"Did you do this, Charlie?" Jill asked.

"Yes, I did." He said proudly.

Hesitantly, Jill asked him if he had drawn elsewhere.

"I DID!" He said. He beckoned us to follow him to the opposite corner of the foot of the bed where he had made similar marking.

"Here!" He said.

At least his prints were symmetrically placed.

Going back to work

A drug screening is required as a condition of my future employment. I called the lab office for the hours of operation and printed off directions to the location. Normally, I would have gone by myself, but since Jill is in Wyoming on business, I had to take Charlie with me. We left in a hurry to get there by the 11am morning cutoff. I put Charlie directly in his car seat instead of letting him sit on my lap to back the car out of the garage. We covered the distance fast while listening to a feverish classical guitar number on public radio. I zipped into a half hour parking spot across from the hospital went in and quickly found the elevator to the lab's second floor suite.

An Ethiopian woman sat at the front desk guarding a silver bell and a sign-up sheet. A bedraggled woman with a sleeveless pink shirt revealing a circular bandage on her left shoulder was the only other person in the small monochromatic waiting room. She was filling out a form.

The sign-up sheet was held down by a large silver clip on a brown clipboard. A beaded metal chain connected the ink pen to the sliver clip on the clip board. The chain was too short. The entire clipboard slid a few inches when I picked up the pen to sign my name. This caught the attention of the Ethiopian woman guarding the silver bell and the sign-up sheet wearing a white lab coat and matching white pants. Her brown eyes looked up from the flat screen computer monitor.

That was when the fear of getting a shot struck Charlie. He began to wail.

"No. Mommy! I want to go home. I don't like the doctor. Don't want to go see Dr. BOS –ley!"

"It's okay." I tried to comfort him. "This is for Daddy. You don't have to get a shot."

It was no use. I believe he has inherited my tendency to black out under extreme stress. Yes, sometimes I get so anxious, the part of me that is so afraid, just trails away like water vapor. I must still be present in some capacity. It is minor slip, like tinkling when you sneeze versus a full blown breach of control.

At any rate, I couldn't bring him back from wherever he was. The bandaged woman seemed angry and distracted. She took a deep breath and stopped working on her form.

The receptionist engaged me and momentarily brought me back to reality. "Are you here for lab work?"

"Yes." I managed to find the piece of paper required of my visit with a special sequence of numbers identifying me anonymously. This I managed to find after fumbling through two coat pockets and two pants pockets.

"There is one thing." She said as she unfolded my permission slip. "Children are not permitted to go back with you."

"What?" I uttered.

"No I don't want to go to the doctor!" Tears streamed down Charlie's cheeks. His chest heaved as he choked in the dry antiseptic smelling air.

"You can't take him with you. You won't be able to give a specimen unless someone watches him."

"It's a urine screen." It sunk in then. I assumed they would be drawing my blood. They actually thought I was going to get my two year old son to pee in a cup for me so I would pass my drug test. I really got bothered then.

Charlie was screaming. There was only that one woman in the waiting room. For a second I entertained asking her to watch Charlie. Then I remembered I was in the waiting room of a urinalysis lab. Then I remembered - I was in the waiting room of a urinalysis lab. Before I blacked out, I retrieved the paper from the desk girl. I came back to consciousness out in the hallway with my back leaning on the other side of the closed waiting room door. I checked my person. I located two sets of car keys in my coat pockets and a lens cleaning cloth. The screening form was folded and in my back pocket. Charlie was in my arms. He was no longer crying but his face was wet and his eyes were red.

I took a deep breath and exhaled. "Let's go home."

Charlie exclaimed, "That was fun!"