Seen and not heard

I haven't seen my son all day.

Unfortunately, this is not an unusual occurrence. Technology being what it is, and sites such as “LOL Cats” taking up more time in our consciousness than any single feline we have no obligation to feed deserves.

But this was different. My son wasn’t home. He had taken his bike and driven off, muttering something about the library and the Entreiky Ofnydne.

I may be wrong about that last bit. Probably wrong.

Prior to his disappearance, I only heard his voice once. It echoed through the hallway and into my bedroom early this morning, dulled by sleep but sharpened with alarm when he noticed the presence of light in the sky.

This is also not unusual.

"What time is it? I’ll be late. I can't be late!"

But his willingness to venture out into the world … is a little out of character.

I didn't have the heart to play tricks on him (even though I am ALWAYS of the mind to do just that), so I told him the truth: He had an hour to get to the library for the very important, ultra shrouded in mystery, literary extravaganza that the tween librarian had devised ... and that I knew nothing about. Even though I had visited the website and scrolled through vacation week offerings.

Nada.

Not that the librarian is a tween. He is just a clever bibliophile, catering to a crowd of soon-to-be teens who have sort of aged out of story time but still kinda believe in magical creatures ... like Santa’s elves and Amazon’s Free Shipping.

But I digress.

This library function wasn't some snooze-fest geek-a-palooza printed in last month’s calendar as an afterthought. This was a vital word-of-mouth soirée that could change the course of an 11-year-old’s entire vacation. Plus it had all-you-could-eat popcorn.

And he NEEDED the entire hour to get ready.

I mean ... he had to shift his messy crop of bed-head hair from one side of his face to the other; pour an entire box of breakfast cereal into a bowl so he could pop handfuls of apple-flavored loops into his mouth as he pulled socks up over the bottoms of his pants because that's his style now.

I've seen this feat, and it's not at all like watching paint dry, especially if I haven't "right-side-outted" his socks, which, as the lackadaisical laundress that I am, is highly likely.

The only challenge left, then, would be lacing up his new purple Chuck Taylors (that only Santa knew he wanted) with the use of his one free hand. Since this will probably seem a daunting enough of a task, he will probably jam his cheeks with whatever nuggets of fortified sugar cubes remain uneaten, allowing him to have full use of both hands for the loop, swoop and pull portion of the dressing exercise. And, if I know my boy, he will continue to eat by osmosis as he pedals his bike to the library.

Hopefully, he will have finished his cheek-pocket meal by the time he reaches his destination and has to speak to anyone.

I just hope they can understand him.

Only 367 shopping days until next Christmas

I was startled by the air-filled sigh that rustled the hair on my arms as I gripped the steering wheel.

It was coming from the lump of teenage flesh — still a few ounces too light to engage the passenger-side airbags of my car — to my right.

I didn’t know what to make of it. The girl had been so happy, so bubbly, so brimming with enthusiasm for this eleventh-hour Christmas shopping trip with her mom.

She had been chirping about it all week. Just moments before, she’d even twittered about the stores she might visit and gifts she hoped to find as I white-knuckled my way through traffic.

But the suspiration was a harbinger. 

“We can’t go to this mall!” she exclaimed with alarm just as I had carefully eased our car onto that same shopping mecca’s access road.

I don’t understand. “The whole point of this trip ... for the past 35 minutes at least ... was to go to THIS mall?!”

She held up her phone and thrust it in my direction.

If she had held it back from my face another six inches I might have barely made out a couple of big-headed cartoon characters that resembled simulated friends, but with my aging eyes and traffic laws being what they are, not to mention a swath of cars swishing by on my left, I demanded she explain herself.

“I know people at THIS mall.”

Now, I don’t know the exact translation of teenage-ese in which she was attempting to communicate, but I fully understand that it’s likely a statement conveying the kind of metamorphic adolescent embarrassment that expands a thousand-fold when one is shopping with one’s mother.

And while I can empathize with her predicament having been a teenager once myself, I could also fully appreciate the miracle that kept my own mother’s head from rocketing off her shoulders and blowing up into a gazillion fiery shards.

I quickly calculate an alternate destination and manage to navigate back onto the highway, all while lecturing about the probability of seeing familiar human beings is likely to be extremely high, no matter where we land.

She flaps her arms a bit and directs us back to the initial destination.

I hold my breath and take a different exit. This is just the beginning. For the next hour, we will have angst about parking proximity and crowd densities and the general queasiness of feeling out of place.

I also know a single, happy purchase will turn the mood around.

Three shops in, her eyes narrow on a sweater.

And not just any sweater. This one is a snowball-white, coconut-fibered confection of impossible softness that will make her the envy of the school Christmas concert.

And it will only set her back seventeen and change.

Her smile had returned as she made her way to the dressing room and then to the sales counter. She practiced third-year math and had enough cash at the ready.

The cashier smiled, but announced a foreign price .... starting with thirty-four.

We both stood there blankly for a moment but my daughter, trying to patch this glitch in the matrix, acted quickly, digging into her wallet for more cash.

I can’t help by try and stop this forward momentum.

“Wait ... the tag says seventeen ...”

I don’t have a chance to finish. The cashier is used to this exchange.

“I’m sorry but our prices are in euros.”

I turn my attention to my daughter, who hasn’t handed over the difference. “This seems like a deceptive practice. It’s perfectly okay if you want to stop the transaction.”

My daughter puts her cash away. “Yeah, I think I’ll keep looking.”

We left the store, walked about a hundred feet and found — I kid you not — the exact same sweater hanging in the center of a flurry of tops in a display window. But this one had a giant tag draped around it, beauty pageant style, announcing it could be had for the bargain price of ten dollars (minus one penny).

She tried on three styles of coconut jumpers and settles on the doppelgänger she’d had her mind set on previously.

The nice young lady at the counter bleeps up the price ... and starts with twenty-four ...

I can’t help myself ...

“This sweater is in your window with a sign advertising it for $9.99.”

“That was our crazy sweater sale.”

I cock my head. “Yes? And this is one of the sweaters in the window. With a sign that says $9.99.”

“I think or crazy sweater sale is over now.” 

I blink. We trade another couple of sentences where were state the obvious. There is silence.

My daughter is shrinking beside me. She starts to apologize for my logic and obstinance. She’s ready and willing to split the difference.

And I am almost about to let it go when a manager swoops in and gives the clerk the approval she needed to give us the sale price.

“It’s fair, and we want people to be happy,” he says with a practiced flair that helps everyone save face.

My smile suddenly feels less tight, though I’m a little afraid to look at the expression on my daughter’s face. 

I worry that being in the vicinity of mortification may have killed her buzz.

But she’s smiling and typing away on her phone.

“Hey ... I just looked up the Euro conversion rate: 17€ should have been about $24 ... not $34.”

“Want to go back? Cause a scene? I’m ready!”

“Maybe next time. Let's just get outta here before I see someone I know.”

Here kitty, kitty

The cat disappeared.

Friday of last week. That was the last time I saw her.

Our big ol' black cat.

A dog chased her under the next-door neighbors' porch, and she found some level of safety by wedging herself up into the joists. Once the melee was over I couldn't coax her out. She just glared at me with contempt.

"You are to blame," she repeatedly hissed in response to each of my "here kitty-kittys."

She's not wrong.

I feel some guilt. I invited that dog to come to our house every Wednesday and Friday for playdates. He would launch himself over couches and accordion carpets and she would find herself scarce until the canine revelry subsided, which it usually did in short order.

Still, she took the house guest as an opportunity to peruse the perimeter of the yard, or, if the weather was inclement, retire to her boy's room, where his homemade bed tent turned the lower part of his bunk into a comfy cardboard box fit for a lioness.

Which, truth be told, she sounded like as she chastised me from under the decking of that neighbor's porch.

I know the experts say cats don't hold grudges, they just work through trauma in their own feline way.

But this feels personal.

And yet I believed she'd find a way to forgive me. She'd come back. That's what I told myself and the kids when they asked.

She has disappeared before. She's always returned eventually, I presume when she's good and ready.

But the snap in the air gives me a nagging feeling. One day turns into one week, which is halfway to her most protracted sojourn two Augusts ago. It makes me wonder if she's ever going to be ready to come home again.

The last time she disappeared the weather was more conducive to following her hearts' content wherever it dangled its unraveling ball of yarn: Down the block, or deep into the neighboring field, made no difference. This morning, however, under a fresh layer of frost the great outdoors seems to be an inhospitable place. Certainly, its vast expanse is no longer teaming with mice.

"Here kitty, kitty."

I called the humane society. Gave a description. There hadn't been any calls. They suggested I try leafletting the neighborhood.

Maybe someone has seen her ... or taken her in ... or given her a new home without big dumb dopey dogs who take over the house on holidays.

Who don't let you get a word in edgewise ...

Who can't stop with the politics.

She could tell people quite accurately that she didn't really belong to us … she was, after all, adopted.

I don't tell my kids about this call. For them, having their cat select another family would be the worst thing that could happen. I also don't mention Coyotes.

Nor do I show them the poster I made, complete with a flattering picture and the word MISSING in the largest text that will fit on the page. I type out our phone number, copying it over and over for the clever pull strips at the bottom. I add the word REWARD.

I look at my handiwork, and my heart sinks. Print makes it real.

“Here Kitty, Kitty.”

What shall not be named

I’ve heard it said on numerous occasions that the ideas in books can be dangerous.

But it never really occurred to me that the library could be a hazardous place, even though there was that one time a couple-a three years ago when my youngest bloodied his lip playing a game of Quidditch on the library lawn as the children’s librarian refereed.

I was there on the sidelines, mind you, but I didn’t see the moment of impact. And I could barely make out the words as my boy reported through tears that he was a chaser for Hufflepuff when a keeper on the Ravenclaw team accidentally hit him with a Nimbus 2000. Broom checking was subsequently banned from future matches. Though he was upset because he thought I would pull him

from the game.

I did not. I wiped my son's lips, checked for loose teeth, and let him finish the match.

(Hufflepuff creamed ‘em.)

No, immediate bodily harm isn’t what most people mean when they say the ideas in a book can be dangerous, and therefore need to be controlled to the point of restriction. They are talking about censorship; often of critically acclaimed and classic works of literature, which tend to weave intricate tales about stark and complicated truths.

Works such as Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning southern gothic novel about racial injustice; and Khalid Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a critically acclaimed historical novel about a father and son's relationship in a changing Afghanistan.

Normally, I'd think about these things in September, when organizers of Banned Books Week remind me in forehead-slapping detail how many works of fact and fiction across the country face expulsion from school libraries because they make parents uncomfortable.

The way I saw it, these mouth-breathing parents probably hadn't read a book since “See Spot Run,” and would never understand why any self-respecting school district would allow any of J.K. Rowlings’ Potter volumes to take up space on library shelves because Hogwarts Academy exalts magic and witchcraft.

That was until my Harry Potter (the movies) -loving son came home with Susan Campbell Bartoletti's book, “Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler's Shadow.”

I felt like a deer in headlights. Or a first-year wizard getting beaned by a bludger. 

“I've been wanting to take out this book forever,” he said as he flopped down on the couch with the prestigious medal-winning tome. I perched over his shoulder and looked down as he slowly turned the pages. Pictures of boys, from the looks of their faces, not much older than him, juxtaposed to a column of biographic material. 

They didn't much look like monsters.

And that worried me. 

I had so many questions. Why is my son interested in Germany during the war? What has drawn him to wonder about Hitler Youth? Why couldn't he have started this quest for knowledge with “The Diary of Anne Frank?”

I wanted to ask a professional. Was this the beginning of some slippery slope?  The launching place where history doesn't repeat itself as much as it recasts the roles of the villains?

Will these new villains look and act like my son? 

Honestly, I was as close to calling the principal and demanding to know what steps he was taking to ensure my son didn't take this information and twist it into some grammar school version of INFO WARS, when I realized this is how ignorance gets a foothold. With people like me not wanting to talk about it.

If there's no room for discussion, there's nothing left but fear and silence.

And he who shall not be named will return, time and time again. 

Watch. Us. Run.

Watch us run

No one ever pegs me for a runner.

I’m neither tall nor fast. My short stature is more penguin-like than cheetah-like. More tortoise than hare.

But run I must. 

Another thing no one tells you about running is how addicted to statistics we might become.

It might surprise you. 

Just as a very well-meaning loved one might surprise you one Christmas (or birthday) by plunking down a half a week's pay for a watch that lassos itself to satellites and provides a compounding list of moments for you to collect and compare. 

It will fold your best time into your best pace and sprinkle in information about the range of elevation and the weather conditions. It may even tell you who in the neighborhood ran the course faster, anything is possible.

It may seem too big and clunky for your wrist, but soon you will feel naked without it. A slave to its lusty numbers. You will love it’s impracticality if only because it brands you as a person who runs.

On rest days you will scroll down memory lane, and discover the ebb and flow of fractions of seconds over the past months curious if not positively maddening.

You may even vow to give up the technology for short stints, hoping to

reclaim your initial love affair with

simplicity.

 But it has turned you into a different person ...

Like maybe you’ll finally be able to follow baseball because to do so requires an encyclopedic knowledge of every play ever made since 1791, when baseball was first mentioned in the US after Pittsfield, Mass. banned the game from being played within 80 yards of its town meeting house. 

Anything is possible now that you are able to keep Jesse Owens’ 100-yard personal best (9.4 seconds) in your brainpan next to Joan Benoit’s record marathon time of 2:22:21, which, incidentally, she held for 18 years until Deena Kastor beat it in 2006.

It’s not as if you are competing against the elite track and field stars. You are battling against your own best 5K time and maybe a secret rival you pick out of the crowd on race day. 

You are lucky to break 35 minutes.

You don’t know why you do it, but you can’t help yourself. Breaking a half hour would be huge, especially now that you’ve bumped up to the next age group.

These personal records are numbers that might be searchable online, but won’t be entered into Wikipedia by a third party anytime soon. 

No, these are numbers only you will use, mostly to plug into your computer’s password fields so you might gain access to the World Wide Web and stalk other racers you know. 

Inspiration, after all, is just floating around in cyberspace waiting to be -ogled.

I don’t know ... you might find yourself searching the race results of friends and family, and maybe even the rankings of their dogs who race in what you ordinarily would have thought of as silly-named events called “Fast CAT.”

Who knows? You may even discover your sister’s Pembroke Welsh Corgi last year ranked 12th nationwide in her division with a top speed of 19.21 miles per hour.

Short legs and all.

You might also discover that your sister had no idea her short-legged, no-tail dog had attained such an athletic achievement.

But as a runner, inevitably you may wonder if anyone makes a watch a corgi would wear?

And if they can deliver by Christmas.