Read Online Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman - Free Book Online Page B

day trip to a lake in the country. It takes half the morning just to pack and coordinate, the rest of the morning to get to our destination. We arrive on the sizzling asphalt parking lot at high noon, a cascade of totes, containers, and inflatables spilling out of our vans. Thirty minutes later, we are all still on the asphalt, inflating, sunscreening, and unloading passengers and equipment. The first time we went, I brought not one, but two magazines for my reading pleasure. Just in case I got all the way through the first and was stuck for something to do. Three exhausting hours later, they went back into the van untouched. Idly thumbing through the glossies is not something you can do in between catering, lifesaving, and commanding a vinyl flotilla. We do have fun. But it isn’t hanging out.
    It’s more like being the roadie for a band. For starters, there’s the sheer physical exertion: the endless lifting, hauling, setting up, and tearing down. “Put it over here, no, over there, there, there !” Then there is the ass-wiping, the puking, the tantrums, the trashing of rooms. There is the procurement of playmates. And the ridiculous demands about food. The gig sounds more fun than it is. The thing is, though, even on the worst days, it still beats a straight job. There are nights when the lights go down, and I stand in the boys’ bedroom doorway with as much awe and gratitude as any starstruck stagehand ever felt standing in the wings.
    One such night, I paused to eavesdrop in the hall as Patrick tucked the boys in.
    â€œDo you know what I want to be when I grow up, Daddy?” I heard my firstborn say. I waited, expecting an elaboration on his recent ambition to become the night watchman in a museum.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œA Cub Scout den leader.” I thought my heart would just give out then and there, because that night it had been my first turn at leading his Cub Scout den.
    If “Be Prepared” is the Scout motto, “Wing It” is mine. I still didn’t have my leader uniform. I read the meeting literature for the first time that day over lunch. I scribbled a plan on an index card, and ran to the dollar store a couple of hours before the meeting with the only two dollars I had in my pocket to pick up supplies. We made crafts and performed a skit. I not only got through it, I had apparently upheld the dignity of the office sufficiently to trump museum night watchman in the shining eyes of my son. Somehow, I had managed to pull it off.
    On a tall shelf against his bedroom wall, I could see the newest race car in his pinewood fleet, complete with tail fins and a chrome paint job, just as he had sketched it for his father. Somehow, Patrick pulled it off, too.
    Somehow, I guess we always do.

5.
    Ring of Fire
    O n our sixth wedding anniversary, the eve of his fortieth birthday, my husband decided to surprise me by cutting off his shoulder-length blond hair.
    â€œSurprise!” he said, as he came through the door, grinning self-consciously and holding up his lopped-off ponytail with the guileless charm of a little boy clutching a fistful of dandelions.
    â€œSurprise,” I said weakly, handing him the damp test stick with its pink vertical lines like bars on a tiny prison window. Impossibly, in spite of being on the pill, breast-feeding a toddler, and the almost complete absence of opportunity, I was pregnant with our third child, and his fourth.
    Slack-jawed, Patrick stared at the stick. His mouth closed, opened, closed again.
    â€œYou’re not,” he said.
    â€œI am,” I said.
    He stared back at the stick, and I thought I saw comprehension dawn on his stricken face.
    â€œYou peed on this,” he said finally, looking back to me for confirmation. I wasn’t sure whether he was asking if there could be some kind of mix-up, or if he just found it distasteful. I nodded soberly, thinking that the unfolding scene was already completely unsuitable for