The Season of Special Favors and Silly Jokes

It’s already 7 a.m. out here on the digital coast, and my wife and I are doing one of those pick-and-roll moves that husbands and wives do in the kitchen at 7 in the morning, when the toast is burning, and the kids are late for school, and the older daughter has asked for a spinach omelet because it’s finals week and she needs a spinach omelet to keep her strength up.

“Shoes!” my older daughter yells from her bedroom. “Shoes!” she screams as if they will come to her, walk quietly from their hiding place under the bed and place themselves on her teenaged feet.

“I think your shoes are in the car,” her mother says.

“How’d they get there?” my lovely and patient older daughter asks.

“Maybe they’re hiding from you,” her brother mumbles.

“Shoes!” she screams once more.

While she quietly looks for her shoes, I work on her spinach omelet. Normally, I don’t make omelets. But this is June, a time for weddings, graduations and special favors.

“Good omelet, Dad,” she says, eating it in three bites.

“Thanks,” I say.

Unlike his sister, the boy is mostly quiet. He prepares for finals by reading about a possible Sammy Sosa trade in the Sports section.

Just the thought of such a trade makes him miserable. Sammy to the Yankees. Sammy to Boston. Sammy to anywhere. Please, Cubs, say it ain’t Sosa.

“Maybe we can get Sosa,” the boy says, ever the optimist.

“Who?”

“The Dodgers,” he says. “Maybe the Dodgers can get Sammy Sosa.”

So I work out the trade in my head. Like most guys, I work out five or six trades in my head almost every day.

One day last week, I traded Glen Rice four times before noon. By dinner, I’d worked out a package to send him, Carlos Perez and Angelyne to Boston for Pedro Martinez. As you might expect, it was Angelyne who sealed the deal.

“Dad?” says the boy.

“Huh?”

“It’s time,” he says.

“For what?”

“For school,” he says.

“Shoes!” I yell, and push the kids toward the car.

At school, I herd the little girl toward her third-grade bungalow, where boys in Laker jerseys are waiting by the door.

The third-graders will remember this season forever, the year the Lakers won it all. They go to sleep with visions of Kobe spinning toward the basket, and Shaq shooting free throws like spit wads at the rim. Mean, hard shots with no arc. Splat.

In 30 years, they will remember this season, this championship year engraved in their size-6 heads.

“Go Lakers,” I say to the boys gathered at the classroom door.

“Go Lakers,” they grunt.

Once a month, I have come to read to them. Today’s the last time. Like always, we begin our session with a few juicy jokes.

“Why did the chicken cross the road, roll in the mud, then cross the road again?” Jessica asks.

“Why?”

“Because he was a dirty double-crosser.”

That’s about as good as the jokes get. We know we hit a good one when their teacher, Mrs. Mizrahi, laughs from the other side of the room while preparing assignments.

“What kind of money do spacemen use?”

“I give up.”

“Star bucks.”

“Good one,” I say.

They bounce like car springs when they tell their jokes. Their eyes sparkle. Excess energy spills out of their ears.

And it’s a good life skill, this telling of jokes. You pretty much can’t go on to the fourth grade without it.

Sure, you could try. You could wander onto the fourth-grade playground without a sense of humor or the ability to toss a good quip. But who’d want to? Eventually, you’d grow up to be humorless and short of friends. Or worse, humorless and just short. Like Bob Costas.

“So this woman went to a motel . . .” said a boy the first week we tried the jokes.

“Um, is that appropriate?” Mrs. Mizrahi quickly yelled from the other side of the room.

“I don’t know,” the boy said.

For the next five minutes, we talked about what was appropriate humor for the third grade. Chicken jokes were OK. Cow jokes were good. Any joke with a toilet probably wasn’t. Just because you overheard your dad tell a joke to a bunch of his golfing buddies, and they laughed and dribbled beer down their chins doesn’t mean that it’s an appropriate joke for a third-grade class.

“I’ve got a joke,” says Adam.

“Great,” I say.

All year, Adam has entertained us with jokes with no discernible punch lines. They were more like existentialist arguments you might’ve studied in college, rambling stories about dinosaurs and musk oxen that only he and I really appreciated.

“Get it?” he’d always say when he was done.

“No,” Abby would grumble.

“I kind of get it,” I’d say.

And then we’d move on.

So today, on the last joke day, Adam somehow winds up telling the final joke of the year. Life is funny that way.

“What did the glacier say to Mother Earth?” Adam asks.

“I give up,” I say, then wait for his usual five-minute punch line.

“Freeze, I’ve got you covered,” he says.

Across the room, Mrs. Mizrahi laughs out loud. Two boys in Laker jerseys actually snort a little. A girl named Claire giggles.

“Nice one,” I whisper to Adam.

“Thanks,” he says.

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Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.