Alex says “Pajamas!” on the way out of his bedroom with an hour to before we leave to put him the bus for a week of camp.
“No, Alex,” I tell him. “You can’t change into pajamas now. Keep your shorts on. We’re leaving soon…”
Later Jill will say, “Sometimes you have to listen to Alex.”
We’ve never thought of letting Alex help pack himself for camp. Once last winter when he was going away for weekend camp, though, I was inking his last name on all his socks when he walked up to the open suitcase and dropped in a plastic box. “Soap,” he said. In retrospect, how much more of a clue did I need that he should help pack?
That night after he left this year, the bus long gone and him up the woods, I go into the boys’ room to shut the door – both boys gone to a camp for a few days and we might as well save on the A/C in between bouts of catching up on sleep – but then I remember that the cat likes to sleep on Ned’s bed. I open their door and spy the dark thing on Alex’s bed and think, “Oh shit!”
They’re just pants but soft and warm and blue; he wears them every day to lounge around and watch his iPad. I hold them up and think of him up there in that strange bunk in a world where so much is strange already. I imagine him that night at bedtime wailing, biting his arm, flailing on the planks of the cabin floor and saying “Oh, pajamas! Oh iPad!” and knowing that both of those treasured things are miles and miles away and maybe even realizing too that a weekend yawns ahead with no mail delivery.
“Don’t lose sleep over this,” Jill advises. “We’ll call the camp and send them tomorrow.”
We do: We call his counselor on Saturday morning and say they’re on their way. She says he didn’t have a bad bedtime without them, but sometimes as Alex gets older and more expressive about his wants (Oh pajamas…), I find it harder to always believe the reports I get from those whose job it is, in part, to give me a break from my son.
UPS wants $56 to send them by Monday afternoon. The Post Office says $14.95, “$27.45 for Sunday afternoon.” “Sunday delivery would be great!” I say, imagining him wriggling with joy when the counselor pulls them soft and warm and blue out of their USPS Express Mail Tyvek blanket and says, like the note I penned, “Daddy sent these, Alex, and he’s sorry.”
Posted by Jeff Stimpson
at 12:55 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, 20 August 2012 12:57 PM EDT
