Family movie night

My son just got braces. The top ones right now, but more will follow. They really do look like tiny train tracks wrapping around teeth.

I don't tell him, I think so.

Something about them has made me see him entirely differently. He's not a baby anymore. 

I don't mention that either, though I think it every time he asks if he can eat something. Not that he cares much about my approval or whether his sister called "dibs," he's concerned about any contraindications with his new appliances.

When maturity hits fast, it hits hard. 

He was just in the living room. Not quite sitting on the edge of the couch. Perching more like. Ready to fly.

He looks so much like a distant cousin of that little string-bean boy who used to swoop around this very room, fanning the air with the pleather-y wings of a homemade bat costume while his too-large, star-badged sneakers slapped the floor with an odd little echo.

But this boy child has filled out and finally grown into his shoes. The echo now sounds like an earthquake.

The television was on, and things on its screen were exploding in slow motion. A woman in a short skirt and form-fitting armor jetted through the sky, straight upwards.

There was no trace of an invisible plane.

He jumped from the couch toward the ceiling, swinging a foam sword from an entirely separate franchise. His unbridled enthusiasm betrayed his deepening voice-over Wonder Woman and her value in the pantheon of Super-Heroes.

To watch him watch her, you'd get the idea they were somehow in this together.

He landed with a thud on the pale green rug in the center of our triumvirate of couches just as the Diana's broad blade, glinting emerald, bloodlessly vanquished their enemy.

The screen turned dark and momentarily silent.

He crowed his approval with a din of whoops and hollers that could raise the ceiling and a father's left eyebrow.

The one that he uses for joking.

Good had prevailed, and only the long shadow of Hollywood would leave us in this interminable pause, unable to believe what we've just witnessed.

Roll. Credits.

I drag my heels back from the place on the sofa where they've entwined with a throw blanket, one of many still being used as capes, or cloaks, or Skold Saueskinns, or what-have-you.

It makes a sound like the scratch of a record player's needle being pulled back on vinyl by an imaginary DJ, only softer. I do it again to make sure. 

My son takes the blanket I've tossed aside and drapes it over his head. In the folding, he's made a hooded, plushy cape that dusts the floor as he goes about baking freezer-section apple turnovers.

He makes a pastry for himself and one for his sister, delivering hers upstairs when it's ready. 

He returns and eats his light and flaky triangle of apple pie filling with a fork.

And when he brushes his teeth afterward, it will be the fifth and final time of the day.

His sister counted. She couldn't believe it either.