Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

Friday, August 15, 2003


Dear Rob,

You may have heard that yesterday America had the biggest power blackout ever in the history of mankind. Frankly, I hardly noticed it, once I got the word that it wasn’t a terrorist attack. Today, Dylan and I heard that one poor woman was trapped in a Detroit elevator for 18 hours. We wonder if she had to pee. Worse, what if she had to go Big Potty? Yikes, what would she do? Resort to her purse? We decided that elevators should have bags of cat litter on hand just in case of power outages. I’m thinking of making that suggestion to the Department of Homeland Security.

Today we went Back-To-School shopping for clothes. Dylan cannot believe you actually enjoy shopping for clothes, Rob. He thinks I am making it up just to entice him to enter the mall. He simply cannot understand why any red-blooded American boy would give a crap what he is wearing. I warned him that fifth grade might just be the year he notices girls. He just gave me his “Yeah, right” look and went back to doing some sort of chicken dance in the front seat of the car. (Having gotten a good look at the chicken dance thing, I now realize maybe 5th grade is not a likely jumping off point in his romantic career.) But Dylan is really a horrible clothes shopper.

At Gap For Kids he crawled under a table and would not come out. When I called him, he said, “I’m fine.” FINE? I had not asked how he was feeling; I had asked him to act like a mentally normal person and try on this cool pair of cargo shorts. So what the heck is, “I’m fine.”??? I told him that Eastland Mall does not have a “Gap For Retards.” He got all pissy and we had to move on.

At Old Navy he simply disappeared. I refused to fall into the trap of worrying that he had been abducted by a band of roving pedophiles. I picked out three T-shirts and sized them up against the back of another tortured child who looked to be about Dylan’s size. (I was able to do this because the luckless boy was shopping with both his mother AND grandmother, and was thus outmatched.)

Dylan had been busy on his own, however, which could indicate a glimmer of possible future shopping potential. He rejected the brightly colored T’s
I had chosen, and instead had two of his own picks in hand. Overjoyed that he was showing an interest in his own clothing, I was completely prepared to love whatever he had picked out. His choices were not bad, just ….ambiguous and disturbing. (to me, but not to him.)

He had chosen both an Army green T-shirt with a shiny Black Hawk helicopter decal hovering on the middle chest and a blue T-shirt with a big PEACE slogan on the front, with a Peace Sign on the back, near the collar. I looked at him closely, but he seemed unaware of any discrepancy. In the check out lane the girl said, “Oh, look! War and peace! Ha ha.” I speared her with a blank stare.

I don’t know if this means that on some level Dylan understands that one T-shirt leads to the other, or if he just likes helicopters and peace signs. I imagine a child psychologist would say it is significant. The grandmother of the poor kid I used for sizing would say, “Oh, come on! Look at the kid; he’s clueless!” I tend to side with grandma. Still, it is odd that he only chose those two shirts.

At Sears I made him try on about 10 things. I would say, “Go put this on and then come out and show me.” He would dodge into the fitting room, then try to sneak up on me on the sales floor by darting around the fixtures, being sneaky and (in his mind) elusive. In reality everyone in the whole store could see him bouncing like a pinball from one fixture to the next. My MO was to ignore him completely until he would jump out and say, “Gotcha!” (then he laughs idiotically, like I had no idea whatsoever that he has been making a complete fool of himself in the Boys 8-20 section for the past 10 minutes.)

I say, “Yeah, whatever, do the pants fit? Or do we need to try a 12 slim?”
Just for revenge I tend to grab his crotch and give a few public yanks to see if the pants are going to be “roomy enough.” He HATES that, which is, of course, why I do it. (I used to do that same move on you, Rob.) I also like to use the stick-my-hand-down-the-front-of-the-pants-in-front-of-God-and-Everyone move to see if they’re “maybe a little too tight.”

Dylan has no idea that I do these things just because I can. He thinks I am absolutely fascinated with how his pants fit his waistline and inseam. (Actually, I must admit, it is somewhat important.) But I can tell at a glance what fits and what doesn’t, so a lot of it is just for fun.

By the time we leave the mall we are no longer on speaking terms. I refused to buy him a stupid-looking hat with a surfer on the front, and that is all he wanted all day. I told him to wait and choose a hat as a souvenir from our upcoming trip to Branson, MO. He gets all pissy again and pouts.

I, of course, love it when he is pouting, because I get to say things like, “Are you still pouting? Okay, don’t let me interrupt the self-pity going on there in the back seat of my car! You just carry on with the pouting, that’s okay, I’ll just drive you home now!” (He totally hates it that he can’t act like a shit without me saying it is okay. Makes him think I am in charge of EVERYTHING, even his bad mood.)

Because I am.

Much Love,
--Mom