Speech Therapy

9:45 Saturday morning.

Booker and Mary have just returned from violin lesson to pick up Seamus and take him over to Max’s birthday party, across the street. Max’s birthday party! Seamus has been feverishly anticipating the event for aweek, insistently melding it with Jussara’s going away party, scheduled for our house that same evening. As soon as he hears the magic words, he strips off his pajamas—he’s been awake since 6:30 of course, but I haven’t gotten around to dressing him for the day yet. Naked, he runs to the shoe rack and jams his feet halfway into his crocs, swapping left for right. He stands defiant, stabbing his finger towards the door and screaming, “Let’s doe Mommy! Det da hot-dods and da tate! Det da hot-dods and da tate!” **

He is a frat boy in the making. He already has most of the defining characteristics, lacking only the ability to sleep it off. It doesn’t hurt that his hair usually looks like it does in the accompanying photo. Not at the moment, however. After the two wild parties, Mary took them out the next morning and got them haircuts at George’s. Seamus was apparently benumbed by the plastic cape snapped around his neck, and sat immobile and stone-faced through theproceedings, like a volcano-god accepting ministrations. Once defrocked, he returned to madness. He is shorn but not tamed.

Booker, meanwhile, is going through rapid personality transitions evidenced mainly by changes in dialect. He has been insecure about his weak ‘r’ for several months. In late summer, there was a short period when, if asked his name, his first response was, “I can’t say my awuhs vewy well.” Then he would tuck his chin into his shirt and whisper “Bookuw.” He got over that, but has not yet mastered the pirate’s arrrr. He recently determined to mask this by affecting a fake French accent. He makes a spoonbill with his lips and produces a noise that sounds like a throaty combination of h, r, and y. “They ahrye dhryiving the cahry ahryound thecuhryve.” Someone must have told him this sounds French, because yesterday, staring out the window at another drizzly winter day he said to me, “I know how to say its hryaining in French. It’s hryaining.”

He is more deeply engaged with the arts then ever. He cranked out yet another self-published manuscript last night, entitled “Rokit Sips.” The title page showsthat he is both the “alistr” (illustrator) and the “offr”—you know, the guy who wrote the book. All this is printed right to left, it goes without saying. We are past masters in decodification of Bookerisms printed and spoken, naturally. On successive pages, the book shows a rocket navigating between Saturn and the Sun, drawing ever closer to the moon. On the final page, the astronaut hops down on the moon to take a look around, all of this bearing a suspiciously strong resemblance to Wallace and Gromit in “A Grand Day Out.” Another fine story about a hryocket to the moon.

** "hot dods" - hot dogs
** "tate" - cake