June 2007 Archives

This afternoon around 1:30 PM, I took a break from my grueling work schedule to eat a little lunch. Soon, some food was in front of me, and I was in the living room and ready to watch some HDTV while I ate. My options were limited to Phat Girls, an episode of Charmed, and a Wimbledon recap show. That's how I ended up watching Parenthood, because, you know, I'm no longer ever allowed to think about anything else.

While Parenthood doesn't particularly benefit from the HD treatment, I still enjoyed myself. I watched a few scenes. Then, just as the bit where Steve Martin pretends to be the balloon-animal-making cowboy approached, there was a knock at the door.

I looked through the little eye-height square window. There was a man with sandy-blond hair and a little Chuck Norris mustache. He looked like he'd spent the previous night inside a smokestack. The urban menace had manifested itself yet again.

For some reason, I opened the window.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"I see you have a stump on your lawn," he said.

"So?"

"I'm the stump grinder."

"You're what?"

"The stump grinder."

"I don't need a stump grinder."

Twin resentments bubbled in my brain: Of being bothered by yet another random, scruffy door-knocker, and of the incessant lawn-maintenance that plagues my day, both with noise and needlessly burned gasoline. I wouldn't hire someone to do that work even if my lawn were nothing but stumps. I would rather stub my toe every day for the rest of my life than have a working stump grinder outside my office door.

"Don't you want someone to grind your stump?" he tried again.

I closed the window and walked away, muttering to myself. I turned around and looked out the window. The stump grinder was doing the exact same thing. Hah. I thought. I'll get him back. On my blog.

"Daddy, you know what I want to be when I grow up?"

"What, son?"

"An animal explorer."

"I would support that."

"I want to go all over the world to Africa."

"OK."

"And I also want to be a candy maker."

"That's also a fine career."

"You know what they call that?"

"No."

"A flurbie!"

"Since when is a candy maker is called a flurbie?"

"No, daddy! An animal explorer combined with a candy maker is called a flurbie!"

"Oh."

"Everyone knows that."

"Well, then, be a flurbie if you want."

"I also want to be an animal explorer, candy maker, and babysitter."

"If you need the extra cash, that's cool."

"You know what that's called?"

"No."

"A gwirbie!"

You know, sometimes I just think he makes this shit up.

Parents: What are your children's fanciful and probably heartbreakingly unrealizable career goals?

Elijah spent a recent late afternoon watching a movie with Regina, who'd taken to bed with the auge. OK, so the movie was Finding Nemo. Please don't make me justify that right now. Regardless, the movie ended, and he left his mother to sleep. I was in the kitchen, pulling dinner together.

"I want to watch a show," he said.

"You've watched enough TV today," I said.

"No I haven't."

"Yes you have."

"No. I haven't."

"You have. Now go into your room and play while I make dinner."

Elijah ran into the living room, sobbing. He sat in a chair and began clawing at his face.

"Daddy!" he said. "You're not being very nice to me!"

"I'm being perfectly nice to you," I said.

"I want to watch a show!"

"No."

"But I've only watched three today!"

"That doesn't help your argument."

"It's not fair!" he said.

"Life isn't fair," I said, feeling very much like a parent.

"I don't like you anymore!"

"That's fine."

The sobbing and screeching continued. Elijah was trying to show me up. But rather than punish, I tried an advanced fathering tactic.

"Do you want to come help me make dinner?" I said.

He stopped crying, looked at me with surprise, and snuffled.

"Ooooo-kaaaaaaay," he said.

"Then come in here," I said.

He did.

"Get your white stepstool," I said.

He did.

"Now, I'm going to fill this pot up with water. And then I'm going to put it on the stove and turn up the heat. What I need you to do is watch the pot very carefully until the water boils."

"What's boil?"

You never know what they're not going to know.

"When the water gets very hot, there are bubbles on the surface. I need you to watch for the bubbles. And then when it boils, we'll dump in the green beans."

"OK," he said.

For the next ten minutes, Elijah stared at the pot like a scientist looking through a microscope.

"I see bubbles," he said.

"Those are little bubbles," I said. "At the bottom of the pot. You need to look very closely."

The TV had been forgotten. I put my strategy into the "good parent" column, which had been a bit thin of late. Next week, I'll keep Elijah busy by watching paint dry.

Readers: Do you have any favorite child-distraction techniques?

This morning, Elijah decided that he wanted to watch Little Einsteins as his breakfast entertainment. For those of you not familiar with this abomination of God, Little Einsteins is the toddler offshot of Julie Aigner Clark's fraudelent series of "educational" Baby Einstein videos. The Little Einsteins are four ethnically mixed kids with eerily large eyes. They travel around the world on "missions" in a magical rocketship called Rocket, to a classical-music soundtrack. However, the music is made slightly less classical by the Little Einstein's insistence on putting lyrics where none were ever meant to tread. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik becomes "I love balloons, I love I love balloons..."

Oh, it's making me sick even thinking about the Little Einsteins. My disdain for this program is well-known around this house, to the point where, when Elijah wants to tease me, he says stuff like, "You know what I love more than anything, Daddy? Little Einsteins!" But I know he doesn't mean it, and I admire his willingness to give me shit.

Once of the most dumbass things the Little Einsteins do is to pat their laps to get Rocket to take off. While they do this, they say "pat pat pat pat..." and encourage the kids out there to "help" them. Amazingly, they always succeed!

After the show, Regina was in Elijah's room, getting him dressed. I stood in the doorway in my underwear and began tapping my package.

"Pat, pat pat pat," I said.

"Nice," Regina said.

"Peenie Einsteins!" said Elijah.

Regina and I looked at each other with the pride that only those who've spawned a comedic genius can feel.

"Little Peenies!" said the boy.

"That's probably more accurate," I said.

Elijah raised his arms and said, loudly, "HA HA HA HA HA!" Clearly, this was a moment of triumph for him. We needed to bring him back down.

"That's a pretty funny joke, Elijah," Regina said. "But you can't tell it at school or you'll get in trouble."

"It's our private family joke," he said.

"That's right," I said.

At least until now.

The New Face Of Evil

Dinnertime was approaching rapidly on Saturday, and, as always at dinnertime, tension built in the house. How would we get the cooking done with a bored child at hand? Television came to mind, as it sometimes does.

"I want to watch Nick Jr.," Elijah said.

A cold wind blew across my soul. I saw the future, the Drakes and Joshes, the Hannah Montanas, the Naked Brothers, and the Really Rodneys or whatever the fuck that show is called. Worse, by the time Elijah reached the tween target market, those shows would be long gone, replaced by ones that are even worse.

"Let's see if we can find something else," I said, as I began to scroll through the DirectTV guide. "How about this one? Great Predator Attacks."

"Yeah!" he said. "I want to see predators attack!"

Then I read the description: "Recreated footage shows how three people survived vicious alligator attacks in the swamps..."

"No," I said. "This is not for you."

"Yes it is!" he said. "It is for me!"

The confrontation was building. Then, through the little plate-glass window that opens at the top of our front door, we heard:

"Hellloooooo! Helloooo, neighbor!!!!!"

I went to the door.

It was the lady who lives in the house directly to our west.

This, if you recall, was the woman who gave us half a package of frozen garlic bread as a housewarming present, and who one day, unbidden, pulled up her skirt to show Regina the shorts she had on underneath. More recently, she'd had her floors redone and had put yards of moldy fabric out on the curb, with a sign that read "free carpet and pads." As of today, the carpet and pads were mysteriously gone, replaced by a cardboard box with a Slow Children At Play sign affixed to the front. It's like we live next door to Grey Gardens, only this neighbor has no delusions, and she ain't no Kennedy.

On Saturday, she came a knockin' with purpose.

"I was wondering," she said, "if Elijah likes to watch movies."

"I like the Spongebob movie!" Elijah said.

"He does," I said.

She held up a copy of The Bridge To Terabithia, recently released on DVD.

"I just watched this," she said. "And it's so wonderful. For the imagination. I thought Elijah might like it."

"Like what?" Elijah said.

"A movie," I said.

"I like the Spongebob Movie," he said.

"The only thing is that the girl dies in the end," said our neighbor. "She falls off a rope swing and drowns. That might be a little bit too much for a young boy to handle."

"Nah," I said. "He's seen Bambi. And we had two cats die last year. He's familiar with mortality."

Though I don't remember inviting her in, suddenly our neighbor was in our house, waving her copy of The Bridge To Terabithia in Elijah's face.

"Elijah," she said. "This is a movie about this young gentleman and this young lady who like to draw with their imaginations, and they have many wonderful adventures even though people are trying to stop them."

Cut to the chase, lady, I thought. Elijah was thinking the same thing.

"Are there any monsters?" he said.

"There are monsters," she said. "But they're good monsters."

"I like monsters that eat things with blood," he said.

She didn't quite know what to make of that statement, but she left us the video, letting us know that she needed it back tonight because she didn't want to pay a late fee at the Video Hut on Hyperion.

"Should I just leave it in your mailbox?" I asked hopefully.

"Nope. Just knock-knock," she said.

I put on the movie, and set to cooking.

Before I begin my latest account of colt-wrangling, let me point out this very nice article in the L.A. Daily News about Offsprung. Speaking of Offsprung, I encourage you all to head over there now, as we're dry-launching our new "community" features, which will suck your soul from your body so slowly, you won't even know it's happening.

Now then:

Elijah was being really cute this morning, telling little jokes, saying please and thank you, dancing around the living room while squealing his little squeal-thing that he does. I can't pin down the moment it went wrong. Maybe it was a combination of factors. I told him that I didn't care if he was a ghost. He had to take the blanket off his head because it was time to get dressed for school. Regina told him that he had to drink his milk. And I pulled a pair of light-blue socks out of the drawer.

Suddenly, he was a miserable, snivelling beast, kicking at our shins, thrashing in the hallway, deliberately drooling phlegm onto the floor, screaming "IT'S NOT FAIR!!!!" when we took away his treat privileges and his TV privileges for the rest of the day. We finally calmed him down enough to get him into the car with me. Then he declared that we'd given him the wrong color vitamins, and he threw them in the dirt. I told him that he could get his vitamins when he came home from school, but he'd thrown these in the dirt and I wouldn't replace them.

The drive from school takes three minutes. By the time it was over, I felt like I'd crossed the Atlantic overnight. Elijah spent our precious time together trying to escape from his seatbelt, screaming "TURN! AROUND! RIGHT! NOW! OR I WILL BE VERY ANGRY!!! I WANT MY VITAMINS!"

A shoe cleared the passenger seat, landing on the floor below. Then a hard plastic dolphin connected with my ear.

"THAT'S IT!" I said. "You do NOT throw stuff in the car. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?"

The following minute was very loud, on both our parts, and ended with Elijah losing his teeball privilege for Friday, with an escape clause for good behavior, though the loss of treats and TV were immutable. He clung to me on the playground for about ten minutes. We kissed and made up, and then I went home, sat alone in the basement, and felt like shit for the rest of the day.

This inspiring tale of contemporary American parenthood has been brought to you by Offsprung:Telling The Truth About Parenting Since May 2007.

One night last week, around 9 PM, Elijah began to complain of a stomach hurt. By 10 PM, he'd slathered his sheets with what can only be referred to as whitefish in red sauce. And the vomiting continued all night.

He spent the next day in our bed watching videos, running a low-grade fever. Regina attempted to diagnose.

"I think he has Lyme disease," she said.

"He does not have Lyme disease," I replied.

"I hate limes," said Elijah.

"No, Neal, I think he does," Regina said.

Her reasoning was this: Elijah had gotten bit by a deer tick when he was taking a hike in Nashville with Regina and his Nana. The tick burrowed inside the top of his ear for a couple of days. And that former burrow was still a little red, with a whitehead at the point of healing. Therefore, Lyme disease.

"Come on," I said.

"Sometimes it takes weeks to manifest itself," she said.

"Right."

"And it can seriously damage his heart."

"OK."

"You're not taking me seriously."

"Right. Because Elijah doesn't have Lyme disease."

Then over the last couple of days, Elijah suffered from something unmentionable here, but let's just say that some people think it's gross, but it really tastes good on toast. And I've heard this phrase several times:

"If he doesn't get better soon, we're going to have to take him to the doctor."

To which I've replied:

"You never know. He could have Lyme Disease."

To which Regina has replied:

"Asshole."

This morning, Elijah freaked out in the bathroom because I washed his hands with a bar of soap instead of the usual liquid soap. He said I'd "ruined" his "decoration soap," and then he pulled a towel of the towel bar and kicked at my shin.

He was off to his room for punishment. Once in his room, he fell to the floor and clutched his stomach.

"OWWWW!" he said. "My tummy hurts really bad!"

"Uh-huh," I said. "You'd better apologize to me right now, mister."

"My tummy hurts!"

"Neal," Regina said. "His tummy really could hurt."

In the midst of my highly-effective disciplinary action, Regina sent Eljiah to the toilet, where he immediately proclaimed that his tummy felt better. Then he apologized to me and we washed his hands with liquid soap.

"If he says his tummy hurts again," Regina said. "We're going to call the doctor."

And that's when the alien burst out of Elijah's stomach. We were too late. And now something evil is crawling around in the ducts.

Saturday afternoon, because our couch is still on the back patio covered with a tarp, Regina and I were sitting in chairs in the living room, desperately hoping for the hours to pass until bedtime. We love our kid, obviously, but occasionally we just wish he'd hit the sack for a while. Elijah had no such interests, and he was running around doing productive work like throwing stuff at the dogs and singing a song he's written about a banana who rollerskates. It goes:

There was a banana who rollerskates
Sometimes he eats some evil apes...

And from there it just degenerates into nonsense.

At some point, while Regina and I stared at the wall numbly, Elijah approached, holding a green Candy Land game piece in his right hand. He placed it on his mother's right breast, pressed down, and lifted it up.

"BOING!" he said.

Then he did it again.

"BOING!"

And again.

"BOIIIIIIIING!"

"Elijah," I said. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I'm playing boing on mommy's breasts," he said.

"He can't do that, can he, Regina?" I asked.

It may seem strange that she didn't react. But honestly, the boy does so much weird shit all the time that the fact he was using his mom's boobs as a toy trampoline didn't really register. But every woman has her breaking point when it comes to a kid playing with her tits. Regina's is, apparently, three bounces. She snapped awake, and the mommy hammer came down.

"No, he cannot," she said. "And if he does it again, he will be punished."

Elijah moved the piece toward Regina's chest again, whispering boing boing boing.

"I'm serious, Elijah," she said. "These are mommy's private parts and you cannot play with them. It's not appropriate."

"But Shaq has breasts, too," Elijah said.

"Shaq does not have breasts," I said. "He's a boy."

Elijah came over to me with the piece, aiming it toward my chest.

Boing, he whispered. Boing boing boing.

He turned to Regina.

"Mommy?" he said. "Can I put this on Daddy's chest?'

"That's up to Daddy," she said.

"OK," I said. "But only if you let me watch the Dodger game later in peace."

"OK, Daddy," Elijah said. "I hope the Dodgers defeat the bad guys."

Here came the piece.

Boing. Boing. Boing.

The cryptic talk can end now. We've moved. It's been a busy month. Regina saw an ad on Craig's List for a house in the neighborhood we want. We responded to the ad. We saw the house. Four days later, we signed the lease and found someone else to take over the lease at the old house. Two weeks after that, we were sleeping in a new zip code.

Yes, we're paying a little more a month. And yes, we only have one bathroom now, as opposed to the three we had at the old place. Also, because of various weird angles, we couldn't fit our sofa through the door and now we have to sell it on the Internet and buy a new sofa.

But the house is twice as large. Regina's studio is twice as large, and so is my office, which is in the basement. It has blue walls, XM satellite radio, Direct TV, and a private garage entrance. They're going to have to airlift me out of my Lay-Z-Boy when I die down here.

I no longer have to step over my dresser to get into bed at night. We no longer have to share our backyard with the neighbors who live in the house behind us. There are no more serial-killer-style ice-cream trucks playing "It's A Small World After All" and "Turkey In The Straw" at full volume from 3:30 to 7:30 every PM. The air doesn't always smell like paint thinner here. There's no more drag racing down our street. Packs of mean-looking dogs don't roam the streets at night.

In the old neighborhood, we lived next door to mean old sisters who spoke to us once in 18 months, and who were always in their dusty backyard, asking their stupid, ugly dog if he "wants a pepperoni." Here, a kooky lady, somewhat less old, ran over to us in her sundress on moving day, squealing with joy at our arrival. Then she gave us half a package of frozen garlic bread. She'd eaten the other half already.

The other day, our new neighbor sat in her backyard, spraying a straw gardening hat with hideously stinky varnish. She did this for two hours. And the other day, she and Regina were chatting when she suddenly lifted up her skirt. Regina gasped.

"I have shorts on!" she said.

So this isn't some gated suburban escapist sinkhole. The day after we moved in, Elijah and I took the dogs for a walk. We passed by an house that, 50 years ago, would have had a Raymond Chandler heroine peering through its bay windows, smoking a cigarette, wearing a red velvet dress.

"What's that in the bushes?" Elijah asked.

I looked.

"It appears to be two dead roosters," I said.

"Oh," he said. "Who put them there?"

"I don't know," I said, not wanting to tell him that they were probably in a cock-fighting ring 12 hours ago, and that dead cock-fighters sometimes get tossed out of moving cars by their angry, drunk owners.

"Well," he said. "That's nature."

"True enough, son," I said.

"Things die in our new neighborhood," Elijah said. "And I like it."

In the evenings, we hear crickets, and wind chimes, and a gentle, wispy breeze blowing through the trees. I keep waiting for something to pierce the quiet. Helicopters don't count. You can hear those anywhere. But where is the screeching motorcycle, the sound of a bottle breaking, or something that could just as easily be a gunshot as a backfiring motor?

Actually, I know where.

But we don't live there anymore.

On Saturday, my friends The Sippy Cups were playing a charity event in Beverly Hills, and they got Elijah and me onto the guest list. This event was called Kidstock, and it benefitted something called One Voice, a Santa Monica-based nonprofit that, among other things, helps obtain college scholarships for poor kids. Naturally, the event was sponsored by Lucky Jeans and was held at the Greystone Mansion, a castle and public park that got to play Wayne Manor in Batman and got to host James Woods' wedding in real life.

Kidstock featured a lineup of several bands, of which The Sippy Cups were the most professional. They played in the castle courtyard, like minstrels in a Renaissance-era play about wretched bourgeois excess. Other groups included The Jack Bambis, which was basically The Patti Smith Group, but from Silver Lake, and also everyone in the band was 12 years old. They were legitimately terrible, but at least they looked like an actual rock band. This being Hollywood, there were at least two other kids groups, one of which had a "rap" name like Kidz4U and the other one sang and danced like they'd come from a pre-motherhood-era Britney Spears training camp run with Al-Queda-like rigorousness. Also, it's not really a rock festival if the DJ plays "Barbie Girl" and "Oops, I Did It Again" between acts.

The catering, while no New Orleans Jazz Fest, was still top-notch considering the average age of the audience. Just like at Woodstock, adults got to eat sandwich boxes catered by Urth Caffe. There was a cart that sold cooked churros and soft pretzels as well as a sno-cone stand and a stand offering unlimited ice-cream bars. Entertainment booths included one where kids could put on a rock star wig and sunglasses, one where they could get their hair spray-painted, a fake tattoo stand, and various places to make beaded necklaces and musical instruments. The 150 or so kids in attendance certainly seemed to enjoy themselves, and their nicely-coiffed parents snapped digital pictures bemusedly. Let them eat churros, their poses seemed to say. It occurred to me that for rich kids in L.A., this kind of event is a weekly occurrence, and I found myself worrying that my son would grow up with twisted values. Regina and I, after all, are such kind, simple people. We're nothing at all like anyone else in Los Angeles.

Because we were special guests of the band, Elijah and I got to hang out in the "green room," which contained the exact same goodies as the rest of the festival. He ate some M&M's, half a cookie, a Sno-Cone, and a soft pretzel. When I told Regina about this later, she said, "He ate WHAT?" For lunch, I'd given him broccoli, carrots, and smoked whitefish, and he'd eaten it all like a good little Jew. I had nothing to prove. Yes, four treats was excessive, but how often does a boy get to go to Kidstock?

Elijah danced a lot to The Sippy Cups, though I think that was mostly because he discovered that if he jumped long and hard enough, his shorts would slide down around his ankles. Also, we devised a game that seemed to involve me hitting him over the head with a beanbag chair. The mothers and children around us, most of whom seemed to be busy putting lip-gloss on one another, were oblivious, even when Elijah started hitting me with a beanbag chair.

Other than the band and the snacks, Elijah showed no interest in other Kidstock activities. All he wanted to do was hang out at the koi pond and watch the turtles. When we arrived, a boy a little younger than Elijah was reaching into the pond and attempting to flip turtles onto their backs.

"Shouldn't be doing that there, sport," I said.

The child's mom awoke from her cell-phone-induced haze on the lawn adjacent to the pond.

"Are you flipping turtles again, Kyle?" she asked.

And then she leaned down so they could flip turtles again.

"Stop flipping turtles, dummy!" Elijah said.

"Elijah," I said. "Don't call a stranger dummy. Even if they are one."

We walked away quickly after that. At the exit, one of a seemingly infinite army of beige-shirted female volunteers handed us our mandatory gift bag, bright orange and emblazoned with the Lucky Jeans logo.

"Thank you for coming to Kidstock!" they chirped.

"Elijah," I said. "What do you say to the ladies?"

"Thank you for having me!" he said.

"Good boy," I said.

We went to the car and looked at our bag. Inside was a Celebutard Whore Training Kit: Lotions, soaps, a red Lucky Jeans bandanna, some sort of fruit energy drink, and a little plastic doll that kind of looked like Paris Hilton and came complete with small plastic dog.

"This is girl's stuff," Elijah said.

"Thank God you're not a girl," I said.

"I would like to keep the candle, though," he said.

The candle was a soy candle, mint-scented, from a reputable manufacturer. It was definitely a worthwhile piece of swag. We left the rest of the bag in the parking lot. I turned the Dodger game on in the car, and Elijah started looking at the library books we'd picked up earlier in the day.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, son?"

"Who would win in a fight: A Triceratops or a bull shark?"

It was nice to be back in reality.

Afterbirth...
stories you won't read in Parents magazine

Saturday June 9th

cast in alphabetical order:
Jordan Brady
director, "Confessions of an American Girl"

Hope Edelman
author, "Motherless Daughters," "Motherless Mothers"

Adam Nimoy
director, "NYPD Blue" and "The Gilmore Girls"

Neal Pollack
author, "Alternadad", creator Offsprung.com

Johanna Stein
"Curb Your Enthusiasm"

Moon Zappa
contributor, "Blindsided by a Diaper"

and a few others....

M Bar
1253 N. Vine St. (Vine and Fountain), Hollywood
doors open at 6:30, show starts 7:30-ish
$10 with reservation
$15 at the door
call 323-856-0036 for dinner reservation.

AND ALSO THIS:

Someone else has our booster seat. We left it at school on Thursday, Elijah told his sitter to pick up the wrong one, and now we have a booster seat that is the same model as our other one, but five degrees further down the line in terms of child-imposed skankitude. Elijah, for one, does not appreciate being driven around while sitting on another kid's crusted drool and jam stains. To make matters a bit worse, Elijah's seat is now being sat in by the child of one of the teachers at the school, so my usual strategy of nagging the other parent until the other parent is sick of me isn't going to work here. I'm not saying that the teacher is deliberately hoarding our booster seat. She probably has other stuff to worry about. Regina is shy, and Elijah is constantly hysterical. Getting our booster seat back is going to be my unique burden, and challenge.

As the sun went down last night, even without the right booster seat, we celebrated a half-assed version of Shabbat. The table got cleared off, Regina roasted a chicken, we lit a couple of blue candles, and we made Elijah turn off the show about griffins that he was watching on History International. I tried to argue with him and Regina that griffins never existed and can't, therefore, be considered appropriate subject matter for a channel devoted to history. But they both looked at me as though I were crazy, so I let it go.

And then the conversation began:

Elijah: "Can I have a playdate with Sean this weekend?"

Neal: "I think Sean is busy."

"Then can I have a playdate with JoJo?"

"JoJo is busy too."

"Can I have a playdate with anyone?"

"I sent out some emails. I'm trying. But I think the odds are small."

Scheduling a playdate is impossible here. Most kids have six standing playdates a week, and then at least two classes or lessons. And these are the four-year-olds. Elijah takes a gymnastics thingy one afternoon a week after school, and on Fridays he sometimes plays Tee Ball with his friends at the park. But for the most part, we never have anything to do. He's one of the most underscheduled kids in Los Angeles. That said, while we were moving, Sean's mom had Elijah over for the entire afternoon, which was spent dancing, watching The Adventures Of Shark Boy And Lava Girll, and eating cherries and peanut-butter bread. So there's hope in these hills. But on Friday, we were lonesome.

"That means I'll just have to play with you this weekend!" Elijah moaned.

"We can walk to the library," I said. "And then later I'll let you beat me up with your Socker Boppers. Doesn't that sound fun?"

"Yes," he sniffled.

"And then on Sunday," said Regina. "Your cousin Ali can come over and see your new bedroom. You guys will have a great time."

"Yay!" said the boy. Then, his face got thoughtful, and he said, "When we lived in Austin, we owned a house and we could walk to other people's houses whenever we wanted to, because no one was busy."

"Well," I said. "Here we rent a house, and everyone is busy but us."

"But isn't it glamorous?" Regina said.