The Night Before Wednesday

My last Wednesday turned out to be a bust. Full of you-shoulds and you-should-haves. The rigmorale of work, mostly.

My next Wednesday--tomorrow--is shaping up to be worse than the last. Two deadlines, three meetings, a Nervous Nellie for an author, plus a finicky server that is about as supportive as Donald Trump in the boardroom.

Ahhh, but I'm thinking about all kinds of things to keep me from getting too down in the dumps.

1. I got to sit in the setting sun tonight with a picnic basket and some lawn chairs to watch my son's first Midway baseball game, which they won handily. Lots of hits, many stolen bases, a good amount of banter: "That's it, protect the plate" and "Stretch your primary, take a step, take another."

2. You know what's great about my job? I can do a Wikipedia or Google search for a phrase or word in one of the book manuscripts I'm working on and come up with this little gem.

3. I can think about my dinner out Friday at Ristorante Luci to celebrate my good friend's birthday.

4. I can see my perennials are coming up just fine, even without my clearing out the winter weeds and old debris. I've got two new Lupines springing up along the steps.

5. I will look forward to my daughter's coming home tomorrow for a weekend stint--and we'll get to cook and catch up together. She starts her new job at the Minneapolis Farmers' Markets selling bread for Saint Agnes Bakery.

6. I got to stay up late to watch the Twins beat the Sox in the 10th with a walk-off three-run homer by Canada boy. And now the house is quiet--full of sleepers--and the rain is coming down.

7. I got to have a few more conversations with my son regarding some of the chatter from one of my last posts, "Sometimes he's Dewey and sometimes. . . ." I realize now after talking to a few people that I might have misrepresented him as some kind of racy alley cat.

You remember how it was, yes? You're thirteen and your hormones are raging and suddenly you're just hyper-aware of all the sex, drugs, and rock and roll surrounding you 24/7. And then it doesn't help that your class is talking about all the right and wrong choices and you're learning all kinds of new terms like "weed" and "crack" and "boner," and mom gives you a new book called "What's Happening Down There?" with some dorky cartoon on the cover that has a kid looking down the front of his pants, like he's trying to shake out some dirt that flew down during a slide at home. So like adults who learn some new hobby or program--the Weight Watchers gals who tout "points" and "core choices" willy-nilly everytime we sit down to eat or the new fan who learns all the hocky lingo and so you're hearing "what a goon" and "it was like a shot from the point" every chance he gets--my modern teenager suddenly is full of all his new lifestyle words and phrases. But that doesn't really mean he has a hand in it all. Just trying it out in his vocabulary.

His friends came over this weekend and I saw that they flocked to the computer so that they could look up different MySpace pages, and I know which ones they went to because they don't know about "Clear History" yet. So I look over a few pages of girls writing "Call Me" and of boys writing "Now you're on my shit list," and the running header at the top of the pages carries photos of big-breasted women with the line, "Who would you rather date? Cindy or Shayla?" But then I see later, after the friends have gone home, that my son goes back to the Web and spends some time clicking and cruising. But this time when I check through the history of views they're all for "Amazing Sports Catches" and "All-time Worst Race Car Crashes" on YouTube.

And then he tells me tonight that he never did ask a girl to go out and he wouldn't know who to ask if he did work up the nerve. Does that mean when he said "which one" when I asked him his intentions last week he was just trying to narrow it down to a few who might actually say yes to him. "Pretty much" he says.

At a party last weekend some parents and I decide that one of my son's friends is right when he says, "The other guys in our class would probably attract the girls to our group, but T. (my son) will keep them around." Ahhh.