Do I?
When we got home today the boys, who had been so good I thought they might have been abducted and replaced by alien doubles, so as to better study our life forms. They were so good that they were allowed the supreme privilege of watching a movie on a school night, and I had checked out Bedknobs and Broomsticks from the city library. I love that movie, not just because it has a pre-Murder She Wrote Angela Lansbury doing musical numbers as only she could do (didja know she did musical theatre? well, I did).
Middlest Boy didn’t want that to be the movie. “It’s a grown-up movie,” he complained. “It’s going to be scary. I don’t want to see anything scary.”
“It’s not scary,” I assured him. “Look – it’s got a magical island of cartoon animals, and they play soccer. You like soccer.”
He was convinced, finally, and he watched it along with the other two boys.
Treguna… makoides… trecorum… satis dee. I really did want to watch it, actually, but right at about the time that the Wermacht invaded Pepperidge Eye I nodded off.
“Pepper, hush!” Middlest Boy said, startling me.
“Wha-huh?” I snapped awake, wiping the drool from my mouth.
“You were snoring,” he said. “And you were wrong. It is scary. There’s ghosts!”
“Ghosts?” I looked at the TV. Armored knights without bodies were routing the Germans as disembodied bagpipes played on the crest of a hill. I held Middlest Boy in my lap. “Do I really snore?” I asked him quietly.
“Yes!” all three boys said in unison.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be quiet now.”
The Viking and Highlander costumes resisted the German beachhead, and the Empire was safe.
After helping to put the children to bed, I asked Monsieur, “Do I ever snore?”
He looked cornered.
“Seriously, I just want to know,” I assured him.
“I – cannot remember any instance of you ever doing so,” he managed to say.