Moments with Augie

Augie (gray shirt) ready to play the xylophone at school concert

Periodically I look up from writing our book and realize that it's been two weeks since I changed clothes, washed my hair, or posted on the blog. Okay, only the blog part is true, but I have definitely been trying to stay focused. So here I am, checking in and sharing just a couple of the precious moments that keep me going.

Augie had a tooth pulled last week and spent the rest of the day here. His face was swollen and full of Novocain when he arrived, so he kept to himself and focused on building Legos. If you asked a question, he answered with a grunt. Because he couldn't hold his mouth closed, he developed a noisy but effective method of slurping so he wouldn't drool.

Dancing the quadrille in school conceert

So it went until about an hour after he'd arrived. Vi and I had on our tap shoes and were tapping around the kitchen. Augie looked up from his Legos and ventured one word: "Dance." "Okay," I said, not really knowing what he wanted. He guided me into the den, took his position across from me, and began the quadrille he had taught me a few weeks ago. I would call it a square dance, but his music teacher gave him a more elegant term and I'm all for that. He and his classmates performed the dance at a concert last week, and on this day he showed the same enthusiasm in spite of his discomfort.

Another hour later, he happily ate a gigantic lunch and still later said he said no thanks, he didn't need another does of Tylenol. Resilience. It's a wonderful thing.

The next morning he was showing me his newly arranged (world's largest) Lego fire department. He has at least 25 different fire-fighting vehicles including trucks, cars, helicopters, a plane, a large boat, and two fire stations. He showed me the first fire truck, parked in bay number one in the old station. "This is the first one I made," he said, sounding like a historian giving a tour of revered old things. "From this blossomed all these other creations."

Being a third-generation obsessive-compulsive, as he is, is probably a mixed blessing. But right now it gives him awesome organizational skills and he combines it with the language of a poet. That combination would serve me well as I work on this book.

 PS, We're back in the polar vortex again. "Brutal cold" was the TV weatherman's forecast. Stay warm. Or cool. Whichever suits you.