AlphaLima

Friday afternoon we all came home frazzled as usual from a long week of work and school. Screeching from the little people ensued, and Ms. AlphaLima (in her maternal brilliance) figured that a small snack would keep the little people happy until supper. She offered the two kids half of a leftover biscuit each, and they accepted.

Baby Girl: “I want a biscuit!”

Ms. AlphaLima, putting said biscuit into the microwave: “Okay. It will be ready in twenty seconds.”

Baby Girl: “I CAN’T WAIT TWENTY SECONDS!!!”

There’s no gasoline to be had in these mountains, so the wife and I have been riding to work together to save said gas. One of the best parts of this is our spending more time with our cherubim, Sonny Boy and Baby Girl. Such little darlings they are–screeching and flinging and whatnot.

Anyhow, Sonny’s after-school program rewards good behavior with Y bucks (not a legal tender, mind you), and we arrived today just in time to see him redeem three of his Y bucks for a small plastic cellphone. He’s pretty stoked about that, mainly because if you push a little button when the phone is closed it springs open with some violence.

In the five dollar Y buck bin, there were some five car sets of Hot Wheels cars, and the Y matron told me that each car cost five Y bucks. On the way home I thought it would be an awesome after-school program occurrence if Sonny stockpiled his Y bucks for week after week after week until he could procure in one amazing purchase the entire five car pack of Hot Wheels cars.

I got to thinking about the logistics of this. First, the plan would require considerable self control by a seven-year-old tempted each week by bins of fabulous swag–plastic cell phones, plastic dinosaurs, crap like that. And, the plan would require a steady income of Y bucks, something that mystifies Sonny Boy as he cannot really determine what exactly earns him a Y buck. He knows he gets Y bucks for “being nice,” but the degree of niceness, the presence of an observing after-school official, the fact that by that point in the day he’s often worn to a frazzle, all of these things combined to stupify me as well. I didn’t even know how they kept track of Y bucks for each week.

Ms. AlphaLima told me that they kept a chart on the wall of the gym. “What do they write them down with?” I asked. She replied, “Marker. They keep track with a marker.”

The gym is almost always empty when I come to pick Sonny Boy up. I have a marker. I can probably through very little research figure out where the Y buck chart is. Get my drift?

There’s no national, state, or local law as far as I know about adding marks to the Y buck chart. I don’t think that the Y czars would be able to keep track of all Y buck credits each week without noticing one or two extra that somehow appeared there. And the purchase would be the thing of legend. If they caught me, I could blame it on Congress and then the feds could bail me out.

You are correct if you are thinking that this is a foolproof plan.

Ms. AlphaLima did not approve of my wily machinations. To which I replied with some vehemence, “Daggone, Yo!”

All of this serves to underscore that time-honored adage penned long ago (unless I am mistaken) by the venerable Benjamin Franklin:

“Behind every successful man there is a woman, struggling as she might to keep him from becoming even more successfuller.”

Actually, I’ve been neglecting the old blog here lately for whatever the reason.

And the reason I write right now is that I have read a book that I’d like to recommend:

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The book details nine year old Oskar Schell’s quest to discover the lock that fits the key he found in a vase in his late father’s room. One sidenote: his father died in the World Trade Center tragedy. Sidenote deux: Oskar lives in New York, and according to his calculations, there are many, many locks out there.

I never finished Foer’s first book, Everything is Illuminated, even though it features a dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Jr. Mr. Foer, if you are reading this because you googled up AlphaLima, no hard feelings, huh? I sometimes get cases of Book ADD. I have about eight unfinished books on my bedside table right now. Do you think I’ll ever finish Ghost Dogs of the South? Or Nick Hornby’s Slam? Or Where There’s Smoke, There’s Flavor? Or even Open Ground, Seamus Heaney’s collected poems? Who knows?

In his second novel, Foer will break your heart without remotely making it seem like he is writing to break your heart. He will make you laugh–Oskar is a funny kid at times. And, for me, here’s the most impressive part of the book: huge events occur in the plot, and you know that they had to be that way when you read them but you never saw the plot event coming until it appeared right there on the page. Speaking of pages, you should get the print copy of the book because the text has illustrations and interesting layouts and the like that, on casual flip-through, seem gimmicky but, when viewed in the context of the novel, are absolutely powerful and necessary.

A coworker of mine took my recommendation (for once. Many times my coworkers walk away from me muttering “Jackass” under their breath), but she purchased the book on CD so she missed out on the pictures. She said there were times where she thought she was going to have to pull off the road because the story brought tears to her eyes. She has since purchased the print version and is rereading it.

In his cleverness and vulnerability, Oskar is worldly enough to want to use profanity but conscientious and naive to the point that he is “not allowed” to curse. His workaround? To use words and phrases that sound like the profanity he is tempted to utter.

Buy this book. I don’t recommend books much, but this is the best book I’ve read in a while. And well, if you don’t like it, you can do as young Oskar suggests to the limo driver on the way to the cemetery where they are about to inter his late father’s coffin (but not his late father):

“Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.”