On my eighth visit, standing there in my shorts, I finally say to the physical therapist (suspecting her answer will be “no”), “could there possibly be something wrong with your mirror? Because I look about twenty pounds fatter in it than in my mirror at home.”
Instead, she answers, “Yes, it hangs funny because it’s so wide.”
Yes! I shout, inside my head. High five! shouts my inner Borat.
She tells me my lower abdominal muscles are uncoordinated.
Why should they be any different than the rest of me, I say.
Or maybe I just think it.

Nephew (10): You call that a castle? That’s not a castle. I don’t know what that is. That’s a mansion. That’s a big house. Now Helm’s Deep, that was a castle. The race of the Elves is the biggest in Middle Earth. You call those weapons? Those are crossbows! Where are the longbows? Longbows are much cooler than crossbows. Pwoing! Pwoing! Pwoing! Now, if you had a million elves in this castle with longbows, no one could take it. They could defend it forever. Except maybe against fifty cals. Fifty cals, man. Pfkfkfkfkfkfkfkf! Pfkfkfkfkfkfkfkfk! Whatcha doin?

Uncle: [Typing on laptop.] Working.

Newphew: Cool. What’re those?

Uncle: Er, zombies.

Newphew: Cool. How do you shoot them?

Uncle: You move around with the arrow keys and shoot with the space bar.

Newphew: Look at all that blood.

Uncle: Yes, well. Lego blood.

Nephew: What’re those?

Uncle: Devils. You must watch out for those, they shoot fireballs at you.

Aunt: Aha.

Uncle: The more zombies you kill, the better weapons you get. Exploding barrels are pretty good. You build a wall of those and kill a lot at once. The rail gun can kill a whole line at once, too. Personally, I like the cluster grenades the best. From a purely aesthetic point of view.

Nephew: Kewl!

Cousin (18): [Plays The Burning of the Piper's Hut on Irish harp] [To cousin] C’mere and I’ll teach you how to play it.

Nephew: Okay. [Leaves zombies for harp]

Cousin: [Shows him where the fingers go] Like this.

Nephew: [listens with profound concentration] [plink-plink, plinky-plinky-plink-plink]

Cousin: Exactly

Nephew: [half hour later] [plays first three measures] [broad grin]

Aunt: Dude! I just heard a hedgehog in the back yard. Come look!

Nephew: [dashes outside]

A fly navigates the rim of my coffee cup mug. The mug is half-full and the rim is stained with some dried coffee and there is a fleck of granola the fly is after. I wave away the fly and wipe the rim and have a sip.

The rim is stained with coffee again and the fly comes back. Another fly hoovers the inside surface of my cereal bowl, which looks empty to me but not to the fly which is going after bits of various antique cereals AS BIG AS ITS HEAD.

Then the first fly disappears from the rim of the coffee mug and I wonder whether there was always only one fly, except I saw them flying together in oddball fly formation, just a minute ago.

Then I finish my coffee and run upstairs and get dressed because I have to drive my daughter to work.

Well, run. Walk. Tiptoe. Other people are sleeping.

Well, I was going to, but then she comes into the kitchen and says she is riding her bike. I pour more coffee.

How ten year-old boy are you?

• Can you fly for 12 hours without sleeping?

• Can you go another half day, or longer, without sleeping (or even whining) after arrival?
• During this long day, can you also ride a borrowed bike for miles?
• And do backflips on a trampoline for ten minutes without stopping?
• And ride the bike some more, on a bmx course?
• And the next day go climbing for hours on cables and zip lines on a climbing course?
• When you visit a castle, are your only complaints that they have no elven longbows in the armory and that it is a renaissance castle and therefore doesn’t resemble Helm’s Deep enough?
• When your cousin gets carsick beside you in the van, are you nice to her about it, and ask, instead, only, WHAT SMELLS LIKE A DEAD RAT?
• When your relatives take you and your dad to see the ruins of a different, medieval castle are you all Now THAT’S More Like It as you climb the rocky, steep, slippery approach making longbow sounds, speaking of enemy hordes and Tolkein races as you explore the dungeon and examine the view of the valley below and the defenses and orcs and elves and arrow slits and demonstrating how metaphor can be used to gain traction on a flood of new information?
• Are you ready to go back to the bmx course again today as soon as you wake up, but maybe not the trampoline since your cousin terrified your aunt and uncle by spraining her back when she ill-advisedly tried an unsupervised backflip and got taken to the hospital late at night?

If you can answer Yes to all of these questions, then you are a ten year-old boy*

*Which leads me to conclude that I was never a ten year-old boy. Not yet, anyway. There’s always hope, I guess.

I… Maybe you’re like this too. Pregnant women, especially the over six-foot-tall ones, do they make you think of Highlander too? There was one at the deli at lunch today, god, perfect posture, and a grace that comes from chopping off dozens of heads during the centuries, that otherworldly loneliness, but okay with it. She could have whipped out a samurai sword and let someone have it, the kid with the tattoos stocking shelves, zing, blue sparks everywhere, and we would have all been, ah, there can be only one.

Then I bought these peanuts, and now I regret it.

[SWAT]
I have been afraid lately. This struck me on my drive home this evening. Mostly but not only I am afraid to play the cello. This happens, I suppose, when you go too long without playing. And having received a piece from your teacher to figure out on your own over the summer, a piece that is rather slow and sad and simple except that it is composed largely of chords, double notes, that seriously challenge your coordination and immediately prosecute the slightest intonation problems does not help. But mostly the former, I guess.
[SWAT]
Anyway I finally found time to unpack the cello today and after weeks of inactivity it was still in tune.
[SWAT]
Gamma and I had the same dream a couple nights ago. This is not the first time we’ve done this, either. I had a dream about a kitten, I said. Me too, she said. Was it black I asked. Black and white, she said. Mine too, I said.
[SWAT]
We went to the Rosenburg in the Waldviertel to visit some people and watch Shakespeare, As you like it. I thought they did a great job, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Wonderful actors for the most part. We walked around looking at the gardens in the intermissions. Lots of roses everywhere. Somebody sure likes roses, I thought.
[SWAT]
Then I made the connection with the name of the place and said, Doh. The people we visited served three different apple-based dishes because they have six trees and they all ripened at the same time. They also had a fair number of flies and wasps, to the swatting of which the man of the house devoted great energy.
[SWAT]
Conversation went here and there. Beta was at a party, one of us told them. They went swimming. She gave a boy an uppercut, because he asked for it.
Violence is not always a solution, the man of the house said.
[SWAT]

Happy birthday, Beta.