Father-And-Son Night As the Siblings Sleep

Tonight, I worked late, and when I pulled into the driveway, all the lights were on, except the light in Amy's office. However, I should have known that she wasn't "alone" among the waking...

Our front door makes this annoying little high-pitched double-beep when you open it - a throwback to the conventional middle-class Americans who have lived here before us, and worried about "security" [as if there were such a thing in life...]. But tonight, this beep-beep was like a summons; a sprightly pajama-clad Ian appeared almost instantaneously in front of me in the front hall, and almost in lieu of saying hello, proclaimed something along the lines of, "Oh, Daddy, I haven't shown you this Pokemon yet..." and was off in search of an important paperback from the school library.

While I ate some cold supper from out of the 'fridge, Ian was hopping around, talking about random-to-me things, and was eager to go back upstairs to "bed". He told me he had been waiting for me a long time. He told me Mommy often lies to him. I asked him what Mommy lies about, and he said he didn't want to say; he just wanted to tell me that she lies to him. He told me that nobody pays attention to him any more. He told me that he and I never get time together any more, although this deficiency was quickly remedied. He was impatient that I was taking so long, doing things like eating cold broccoli and re-assembling the bunny's cage, which had been taken down in preparation for Madeleine's birthday party.

I let Bunny (a.k.a. "Fuzzy" - not my idea) out of her temporary holding pen, otherwise known as a portable crate, for a bit of "recess" while I ate. We looked at the gerbils and discussed them, particularly Peaches. Ian ran off and got me a Pokemon book - this time not a "novel," but some kind of large picture-book, and showed me which Pokemon Jacob has and which one Ian has, and discussed some highly lucrative Pokemon acquisition of Jacob's, for which Ian was both envious and empathetically pleased, and possibly plotting a similar acquisition of his own.

Ian ran upstairs, and when he came back down, I was chasing Bunny to put her into her newly-restored cage. Ian was wondering why the love-seat (or "love-chair," as Daniel has called it) was lying on its side; I explained that Bunny had been using it as refuge. (Any similarities to current events are coincidental...) Unsurprisingly, Bunny turned out to be smarter than me. I sang her name, recited a poem to her, walked around the family room in circular pursuit, and resorted to various psy-ops, but to no avail... But Ian quickly got into the game, telling me that Daniel was a better partner in Bunny apprehension than I was, and he scooped her up in short order and put her into her gilded cage, laughing at the fact that she was grunting at her captor.

Now we were ready for "bed," which, because it was with Ian, really meant "reading circle." Tonight he was reading the Bible - straight up now, Mommy's red, thin-paged full-volume Bible, some wimpy modern Americanny translation, which works well for Ian - but certainly no Illustrated Bible Stories for Children, as it were. The next dilemma was a reading light source. Being techie-eccentric, and not wanting to fish double-A batteries out of the basement for my reading light, I used my laptop instead. I opened it up, and started up "LibreOffice Writer" - Ubuntu 11's OpenOffice-like alternative to Microsoft Word, although vastly superior, because it's actually somewhat innovative and not produced in Redmond, Washington. I opened up that application because a "new document" is likely the best way of maximizing light from the screen, since it's mostly just white surface. It worked, and we read Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Saint John.

Ian selected the Gospel of Saint John recently, partly because I told him that it's the most profound of the four Gospels, and probably partly because it is written by a "John," and Ian is also a "John," of the Scottish variety. He skipped Chapter 3, which is where he left off from earlier readings on his own, I think because he wanted to go straight to the Saviour's meeting at the well with the Samaritan woman. Ian told me he had been reading the Gospel earlier in the day, but was interrupted "by someone whose name begins with M" - I'm assuming Madeleine, but Mommy's not necessarily off the list of suspects.

Ian meekly requested two consecutive Dixie cups of water in the middle of the reading, and seemed to enjoy drinking them as I continued reading.

Ian was surprised that the disciples were surprised to find Christ talking with a woman. I explained that back then, they were very careful about men talking to women, and that in Islam, they still are, to a large extent, hence the burka, hijab, etc. Ian expressed concern that if a man's wife were to wear a burka, he might not know who she was. I told him I thought that if you know what your wife is wearing and how tall she is, that's probably not a problem. He said that even boys could go dressed as girls, if their heads were covered. Then I remembered the last scene of the movie "Kandahar," where a man wears a burka and tries to get "lost" within a female wedding caravan crossing the desert, so as to escape the Taliban police (to no avail). It turned out that Ian was thinking particularly of this scene from the movie when he imagined a boy posing as a woman in a burka.

Ian was confused by the chronology leading up to the conversation between the Saviour and the Samaritan woman. It turned out that he didn't understand what she meant in referring to "our father Jacob"; I explained that Jacob was her father only in the sense of ancestry and historical honor - that Jacob lived long before the time of the New Testament, and was not the Samaritan woman's father per se.

Finally, we finished Chapter Four, I put away the Bible and the laptop/reading-light and, now satisfied that his day was complete, Ian put his head on my chest and we both went to sleep.

(May 18, 2011)