Les Bonnes Choses

Alot changes in a week. With the exception of the reprieve we got when Asher was born, tomorrow is the first Sunday in a month that we don't have to leave the house spotless first thing in the morning for an open house. In fact, I can't speak for Rebecca, but I'm sort of deliberately leaving messes here and there as some lame act of rebellion. I'm not entirely sure against whom it is I am rebelling -- I suppose I could just cite the nameless 'man', but I thought 'the man' just kept you down; I've never known insisting on a tidy house to be on his agenda.

Another thing that has changed this week is that Monsieur Jude has already loved and lost. Sure, he had his share of flings -- Riley at his preschool used to regularly corner him to hug and kiss him until he fought her off -- but that didn't mean anything. Tonight, however, we were at his surrogate third grandmother's retirement party. The relation is that she is his aunt's (Rebecca's sister) mother-in-law. In genealogy circles, such a link would be tenuous at best, but as we've been at nearly all of their family functions for as long as I've been with Rebecca, the bonds run somewhat deeper. Fortunately for Jude, however, they don't run deep enough to preclude a romance with any of the multitude of female pseudo-cousins with whom he was playing after the potluck dinner. He was especially attached to one of these girls, to whom he first referred as "the purple guy" (her dress was purple), and then "Purple Leah" when he learned her name. He followed Purple Leah everywhere for the rest of the evening. Being about three years older than him, she must have seemed very sophisticated; to be sure, she was very tolerant. But when Jude's night was over, and Purple Leah was not impressed enough with Jude's claim to own Kung Fu Panda to come home with us as he had begged, he was heartbroken. Or maybe just overtired.

It's so appropriate, then, that tomorrow is Father's Day. And I may find myself, just like fathers the world over have for generations, having a talk with his son about girls; and how they're hard to understand; and how they just don't like kung fu and cars the same as boys do; and how, maybe in about 18 years, he should look up Purple Leah and ask her if she wants to go for ice cream.