Mark KennedyThere were two boys with the same obscure first name born on a late October day in 2006 at Parkridge East Hospital. Sometimes I wonder if we brought the correct child home.
As fiercely as I love our younger son, he seems to be from another planet - like Mork from Ork. For example, he has an unassailable memory while the rest of the family seems to wander around in a mental fog.
"Son, have you seen my black coffee cup?" I asked him in exasperation the other day. "It's my favorite cup, and I think I've lost it. I haven't seen it in a week. It's very upsetting, actually."
"It's on the front porch beside the rocking chair where you left it last Saturday morning while you were reading the newspaper," he said.
Dang.
He was right, of course.
While others of us in the family subsist on packaged food, our 9-year-old likes to bake cakes and make icing from scratch using butter, powdered sugar, vanilla extract and milk. The other day he had prepared six loaf cakes - white cake tinted with purple food coloring - and set them out to cool overnight. He intended to mix the icing in his mother's big stand mixer the next morning.
Meanwhile, I got a sugar craving after he went to sleep, and I ate three of the loaves before I turned in for the night.
The next morning the 9-year-old met me in the kitchen with a scowl.
"What happened to my cakes?" he demanded, his arms folded and a frown creasing his brow. "Last night there were six cakes and now there are three."
"Um, I ate them," I confessed.
"You ate THREE WHOLE LOAVES?" he asked.
"Maybe," I said. "Look, I'm sorry. I'll buy you something."
"OK," he said, sensing an opening. "You can buy me a camper."
"We've been over this before," I said. "I'm not buying you a camper. We are not camper people. We are Hampton Inn, two-queen-beds-and-a-free-breakfast-buffet people."
"Well, you gave Bubby $17 for matching socks," my son shot back. "And that's not fair. So, I want a camper."
Two nights earlier I had teased my 14-year-old son by telling him I'd give him a dollar for every matched pair he found in the orphaned-sock pile - a collection that had grown big enough to fill a bushel basket.
I felt like it was a safe offer because I determined there was no way my 14-year-old was going to roll off the couch and dig through the laundry. To my surprise, he spent 30 minutes matching socks and dumped 17 pairs on my bed.
"That'll be 17 bucks," he said, rubbing his fingers together Johnny Manziel style.
Ever since, my younger son has used this sock payment as leverage for his never-ending campaign to force his mother and me to purchase a camper.
"If you buy a camper we could use it for soccer trips and save money," he pleaded. "And when I go to college I'll take it with me and I won't have to get an apartment."
"Not happening," I said. "Listen, I'll rent a camper for one night on Airbnb for your birthday, but that's it."
So we have reached this uneasy truce on the camper issue. Besides the birthday outing, our agreement includes a clause that if anyone in our extended family ever wins the Powerball lottery, our first discretionary purchase will be a camper.
Meanwhile, it's almost two whole months until my younger son's birthday. Maybe he'll forget.
Wait, who am I kidding?
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.