paul·a·ver

“So, would you guys like to do a Shakespeare camp this summer?” Jenn asked the children between bites of dinner. “You’d get to learn a play and act it out.”

“Die, Pikachu! Die!” I hear Graham yelling from the basement, and I go to investigate.

Evan has been bathing for what seems the same span of time that homosapiens has walked the planet. (I regard this as closer to 200,000 years than 10,000 years. But take your pick. It’s a long time.) He refuses to wash his hair until his mother returns from work. He’ll wait longer tonight, because she’s stopping to pick up milk on the way home, which strikes me as a quaint rockets-, flattops-, and martinis-era kind of errand with gender role reversal.

Graham is reading Captain Underpants. He has read it only as many times as he’s gotten up at 6:00 am to tickle me in my bed with his cold feet over the last seven plus years, which is most every morning, or approximating something just over 2,675 times, and which means he has multitudinous Captain Underpants readings to go before he gets bored. We are all Dav Pilkey fans in this house. Well, all of us but Jennifer, the dog, and cat, and the dog and cat only look at the pictures.

I am sitting next to Graham, admiring his crooked grin and twisted eyeglass frames, and I am finally reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson’s memoir of a boyhood in Des Moines, Iowa. My dad gave me the book for my 40th birthday last summer, and it’s been waiting for me in my to-read stack since.

The National Weather service has confirmed an F1 tornado hit our neighborhood with 90MPH winds.

By some peculiar accident of fate and nature, our house is untouched. We have no more than a few limbs down in our backyard. Homes all around us lie beneath trees, temporarily uninhabitable and without power. Around the corner, an old oak vines its way through a front bedroom, under the bed, around dining chairs, through cupboards, and out the back door.

There is a Steve Beshear sign on my front lawn, but I didn’t vote for him this morning.