Love From Both Sides

Lennon’s mommy is running open mike tonight. His daddy is working until after eleven. A visiting relative, who often doubles as a street person in distant cities, sits before the wood stove pretending to put logs into the open doors. Well, she does put the logs in, but she also takes them out, or moves them around, hoping that I won’t notice she is smoking a cigarette and puffing the smoke up the chimney.

I notice, but she is not my company and this is not my house and the stove is at the far end of a large room, so Lennon and I are not smelling the smoke. I do keep looking at her and she finally moves away from the stove and begins cutting mats out of Duke’s hair. A large Springer spaniel who loves the attention, he just lies there grinning, stubby tail pounding the floor when it feels really good.

We are in the count down to bedtime. As soon as the movie ends, Lennon puts on his pajamas, brushes his teeth, we read a book and lights out. The movie he picked is terrible, long, boring, he has no interest in it, but he refuses to give up and turn it off. It is his right to watch whatever movie we start during this routine, but not his right to change movies mid stream and lengthen the whole process.

The dog trimmer is trying to curry my approval, knowing that she fell from grace while smoking. I am waiting for Monday when she will pretend to get on a bus while thumbing her way off into the unknown worlds she inhabits all but a few weeks a year. Her life is the end result of growing up surrounded by a love that included drugs and violence in the seventies. A terrible example of an innocent child caught up in a lifestyle that set the tone for the rest of her life.

Duke growls. He’s had enough. The visitor wanders off to bed, carrying her teddy bear and we all blow kisses and send love flying around the room until she disappears down the hallway. Lennon cuddles up in my lap and I ask him one more time if he would like to turn this movie off and read an extra book? He says no.