The head case and the kid
ON A COLD DAY, it doesn’t take long to dress a 4-year-old -- an hour, maybe five.
He dances as you pull a T-shirt over his head, giggles violently over the intimacy of socks. Since he’s white, the little guy dances with one leg straight and stiff, as if in a cast. The rest of him is a flailing collection of wet noodles. To watch him convulse like this is to believe again in the power of American dance.
“Hold still,” I say.
“Like this?” he asks, spinning.
“I’m serious,” I say.
“Me serious too.”
As I may have mentioned, we’re raising him to be a man of substance, the sort of guy Susan Sontag would approve of. I remember how in her obituary people raved over her devotion to the serious life. That struck a chord with me. I’m sick and tired of writers who try to find the humor in everything.
“Here, let me button your shirt,” I tell the little guy.
“Watch this,” he says, executing a perfect backward somersault.
We don’t have time for this. There are lights to take down. Boxes to store. Moms to mollify. We are tucking Christmas away in the far end of the basement, a spidery little haven just north of hell.
We stow away reindeer made of reed. Santas of silver. To unpack them in early December is all joy and anticipation. Packing them away now is like the last few steps in a divorce.
Speaking of endings, mine may be near. I woke up with a mortal head cold on Tuesday. By Wednesday, Caltrans had declared a Sig-Alert in my nose.
“Here, take this,” my pusher/wife suggests.
“What is it?”
She hands me some of that popular cold remedy, the stuff allegedly invented by a second-grade teacher. Like a lot of people, I think second-grade teachers are often overlooked as research pharmacists. Seriously, there’s so much more they could be doing.
“Tastes terrible,” I say.
“That’s why it works,” she explains.
I’ve ingested quite a lot of liquids in my life -- moonshine, love potions, double shots of hemlock -- but nothing quite like this. You plop the giant pill in a cup of water, then run for your life. The stuff fizzes like pool acid.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I tell my pusher.
“Here, take some for work,” my wife says.
Starve a cold and feed a fever. Or is it feed a goat and starve a lemur? I can never remember. As a result, I eat and drink in copious amounts just to be safe.
So far, so good. In a corner of the kitchen counter are all the food gifts we received. To most people, it would resemble the concession stand at a multiplex. To me, it’s a medicine cabinet. I have a quart of pistachios for breakfast; some chocolate-covered Bing cherries for lunch; a nice Pinot Grigio at about 3 this afternoon -- you know, just to keep my fluids up.
Of course, it’s only a head cold. The worst of it is that I apparently slept with my mouth open the other night, which dried out the tip of my tongue so that it split ever so slightly. In a mirror, it looks like a tiny red rump. It’s a malady I think you usually only see in sheep.
“You OK, Dad?” someone asks.
“Huth?”
“Yeah, Dad, why are you lisping?”
I’ve reached that point in my life that when someone calls me “Dad,” I wheel around in hopes I recognize the individual. At last count, we had four kids, which seems like a lot to me.
My wife says she’d like to have several more except that the current litter has sapped so much of her strength that she can no longer embrace or even kiss. The best I can do is discreetly fondle her while she watches “Grey’s Anatomy.” After 25 years, she has become dead to my touch, a mordant work of art.
“Dad?”
“Huth?”
“Shoes,” says the little guy.
It’s been three hours now, and the toddler is almost dressed.
Let me describe him as he stands before me now: He is wearing a Brian Urlacher football jersey (Go, Bears!) and big fuzzy Spiderman slippers. (Go, superhero vigilantes!)
But that’s not all, no. He is also wearing a pair of underpants on his head, like a painter’s beret, and a pair of red socks up his arms. Lucky kid. He has the sense of style of a circus clown.
“You look very sharp,” I say.
“Thanks, Daddy.”
OK, where’d I put that wine ...
Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. His MySpace address is myspace.com/chriserskine.
