Time passes: the girls who lived next door for three years graduated, and now all that remains is a mattress and a tubular plastic “wardrobe” that we promised to store in our garage. You forget how close the college years are to camping. Reel up the purple string lights, pick up the Solo cups from the lawn, and the house is empty. The girls babysat for us, and the hope was that perhaps they would be replaced by four new architecture students who likewise knew how to braid hair and were willing to piggyback kids around the house. Then came the Jeep Wranglers.
Three Jeep Wranglers, in red, blue, and silver, all lined up at the same 45-degree angle in the backyard, the way a toddler will arrange his Hot Wheels. On the end, a Ford F150—boys.
Scout and Japhy wanted to make them brownies. I shouldn’t assume that boys didn’t want to babysit, I thought. We wrapped a plate of them up in foil and left them on the trestle table (née: beer pong table) by the front door with a note from Scout.
Noodles and I pulled into the driveway later that night after going out to dinner, and the boys were on their front porch. As we got out of the car, they yelled and jumped up and down. “Hey! Hey! We’re your new neighbors!”
We waved and walked over. One of the four was shirtless in a backwards baseball cap, and they were enjoying a celebratory move-in beer.
“What’s up!” I said. “Welcome! Did you get the brownies that the kids made?” The boys looked at each other.
“Scout left them on the table right … there.” I pointed at the table, which was at hip height, no more than a foot from where they were standing.
“Woah!!! Brownies!” they all said, suddenly seeing this plate that had been right there for hours. I wanted to tell them that when I was 20, I slept on a green pool lilo in a share house with an enormous beer-can pyramid. We didn’t have furniture, so we sat on car seats in the living room. “We had architecture students here before you,” I said. “They used to let the kids play in the porch hammock.”
It turned out that, along with studying aeronautical engineering, the boys all play baseball—very promising for young Japhs, who has been calling himself “the wizard” after his baseball coach referred to him as an “infield wizard” a couple of times. “They need the wizard,” I heard him say to a teammate as he thumped his batting helmet on with a spud-fist in the dugout.
The boys said they would play catch with him, which, GREAT. The first time Japhs tried to say hello, though, he came back in right after, disappointed that they had just gone inside their house and left him talking to no one out by the grill.
He tried again a few days later, taking around his Ninjago LEGO dragon to show one of them. Japhs was over there for 20 minutes. Apparently, they are big LEGO fans, and one of the boys has a Ninjago pillowcase. Japhs came back with a swagger to him. He now calls them “the party boys.”
I was walking home from school drop-off the other day and saw their recycling for the first time, always a good study. The party boys had a large box on the curb that said EGGS on each side. Growing boys.
Bless.
previously in our fratty neighborhood:
the time the porch next door caught on fire
a short history of your boobs
In the U.S., you’re supposed to get your first mammogram at 42 (in Oz, it’s 50), and I finally squeaked it in at 43. I knew that for your first one, you often get callbacks because they don’t “know” your breasts yet, and are establishing a history. I also knew they’d flatten them like chicken schnitzel. The techie who set me up wanted to fill in a history before she got started—the obvious family history, but also any other notable events.
I kid you not, when she asked if there had been any other incidents with my boobs, my entire life flashed by my eyes: hockey balls to the tits, trail runs in the wrong bra, the great clogged duct of 2015, soccer balls to the tits, basketballs to the tits, vampire babies chomping on them with razor-sharp teeth, aborted boob tape, trampoline accidents, and dude after dude manhandling the poor beasts while I hissed, “gentle!” We’ve come a long way baby.
Anyway, all clear.
Last camping trip of summer
Japhs, plonking flat rock after flat rock straight into the pond: Mom, you have to be watching me at all costs, because I might skip a rock.
Goodies
What if Traffic, but it’s cuttingly funny, and each characters is more disastrous than the next? Well, you get Rejection. The novel(?) is made up of intersecting stories that send up every self-important thing you’ve ever thought about yourself. I was mortified for every single person in this book, honestly impressed on a writing level at the hilarity and horror of the smut, and aware that in a Sliding Doors kind of way, I was also implicated in the cultural swirl of posturing and preening. It coulda been me! Tony T roasts “the dumb people who tried to sound smart, and the medium-smart people who played dumb to signal relatability (but also because the pose of permanent-kidding insulated them from any serious challenge).” In short, very funny. Out Tuesday. *snatches up READ MORE WOMEN tote bag and leaves*
This compilation of people’s worst pitches in The Drift is a piece of art.
I haven’t actually read all of this Katie Holmes profile, and I don’t really know what Town & Country is ever up to, but the lede is incredibly funny
Big Kate Wagner fan—here’s a good thread on that silly ‘can AI write novels?’ line of “discourse”
Things that never would have melted my heart if I didn't have my kids includes: the absolute adoration little boys have for big boys, and when it is reciprocated with kindness. I hope the party boys are respectful neighbors. PS: Paul took a shine to some big boys at the pool this summer who did very noisy flips off the diving board and began referring to them as "The Radical Dudes."
You’ve had an extraordinary amount of balls hit your tits.