Who's Fightiest Now?

Ice cream makes a good clock, observes Booker, and Seamus prefers his melted. He gave full indication of this preference at Clyde’s, where Grandpa Ray and Grandma took us on Saturday evening. Seamus was better than he ever has been at a restaurant, giving us a full hour of relative peace. Gluttony is not always conducive to good behavior, but in this case it mostly was, and Seamus was content to eat everything within arm’s length while simultaneously playing with his toys, not bothering the rest of us so much. At dessert, as is his wont, he waited for his ice cream to melt into soup, then added the scraps of whatever else was left of his meal, and hoisted the bowl to his lips. Grandpa Ray was much amused. Grandma not so much.

Grandma also gave three matchbox cars apiece to Booker and Seamus. They promptly bestowed nicknames on each—Super Wheel, Super Orange, Mini Cooper (known to Seamus as Mini Tooper), and so on. The best nickname was Fightiest, for the car most capable of holding off all comers in a car fight. When Seamus says it, it sounds like Fi-ee-us. “I want mine Fi-ee-us! I want mine Fi-ee-us Tar!” But they could not agree on which one was Fightiest: Booker insisted it was the blue Pagani Zonda C12, whereas Seamus held—quite irrationally, I believe—that it was the gray BMW Z4. How can a convertible be fightiest?

The advantage of this dispute, I thought, is that they would not need to fight over who got to hold onto Fightiest. But I was wrong: fighting over who is Fightiest is just as consuming as fighting over keeping him. We brokered short-term ceasefires by convincing them to build a parking garage with blocks, where they could each, in turn, rent Fightiest, Mini Tooper and their pals, for ten-minute periods. That worked for twenty minutes. 

The social peace that reigned during Grandma’s visit was shortlived but memorable. We slept soundly that night, knowing that through their shared passion they were building a foundation that would outlast their momentary quarrels, that they were stitched into the weave of generations of love and protection, and that Seamus would wake us at 5:30 demanding to know where Fightiest was. That’s early by any clock, ice cream or no.