a fly on the wall

i am eavesdropping on some 10-year-old's. i hear them burp the abc's. i hear them debate using my younger son's room -- who is not here to speak up for it -- as a newspaper lab. i see them stealing small sausages from the kitchen counter to lure the dog up to her latest trap. it must be a good one, too. i haven't see her for awhile.

one just said, your house is hot and so is your mom. not only do i know that he does not even know what this means, i glance in the mirror and see that i have chocolate brownie batter smeared on my forehead. that is about the furthest thing from hot you can get. more like, fat mom.

my younger son is at a friend's house. he hurled his backpack my way after school and said, see ya! oh, okay, i see my place. make the brownies and catch things that come flying my way.

now i just overheard my son tell his friends: oh, before i forget, my grandmother's sister dated elvis, and then he died on a toilet. this leads to a muffled conversation i can hardly hear, except for elvis' name and some other stuff that someone heard about him. but what? didn't elvis die like a hundred years ago?

i mean, hello, what can be more entertaining than just listening to all this?

it is funny and sweet and oh-so-cosmic that i end up in a house full of boys. boys, in general, freak me out. they touch things that i run from. they have way more energy than i knew existed. my sons are very calm, in comparison to most. but when you bring a third or fourth party in, the dynamic changes and implodes upon itself. they yell. they don't talk to each other, they yell as if they are all 98 years old and completely deaf. why? for the love of god, why?

and where is the dog?

one day at baseball practice, i heard one mom tell another that her older son, who had just learned to drive, went to a drive-through bank. and do you want to even guess what he put in the tube? the tube that goes to the teller? a gerbil. a live gerbil. i don't know who i feel more sorry for, the teller who probably wasn't paying much attention when she opened the tube, or the gerbil who basically got put into a spaceship and plunged into the atmosphere.

now they've gone outside. with cap guns, and a camera. they are working on a video for youtube, and are creating special effects. would girls ever in their life do this? i don't think so. i know why the girls laugh. the little girls, the college girls, the women.....they laugh and whisper because men are somewhat ridiculous. so easily entertained. so unaware of how they come off.

....two hours have passed....

...and that is because i am no longer the world's fastest blogger. that is because i had several 10-year-old boys here. and because then some 10-year-old girls started calling. and hanging up. and then, showing up. like, at the door. they came in, and they all stared at each other for less than 60 seconds -- so the boys decided to play basketball, and the girls left. it was very surreal. did that just happen?

they've all gone home now. i need to go stare at my son's face and see how it is possible for him to have grown up so fast since last night.

slow down, father time. slow down.