Meet the Mayor

When Zach and I are home alone three days a week, we do quite a few retail excursions. Zach doesn't mind shopping as long as it is done at a quick clip with no loitering in front of displays. That works out OK for groceries but not so much for clothes. Exhibit A: buying a pair of jeans. In the past, for me, this would have involved several trips to several different stores, with plenty of time for mulling options. Boot cut or straight leg? Low-rise or mid-rise? Stone-washed? Premium denim? European sizing?

But today I just plain needed a pair of jeans, and I had no choice but to bring Zach along for the ride. As I pushed the stroller into Old Navy I could tell he was in no mood for mulling. So slowly, subtly, like a hawk gliding in to capture its prey, I guided the stroller in smaller and smaller circles closer to the displays, until I could read the sizes as I passed by each pair.

"Can I help you?" asked a sales clerk.
"Yes, I just need an 8-short."
"Which cut? Diva boot-leg?"
Still circling slowly, I surveyed the entire wall of jeans. "Doesn't matter - I'll take the first 8-short you see."

So she spotted some jeans and tossed them over to me, and -- as if in a small-scale, extremely boring version of the movie "Speed" ("This stroller cannot go slower than two miles per hour!") -- I dashed over to the dressing room - shorts off, jeans on, fits OK, shorts back on - and then off to the cash registers without ever stopping. Funny thing is, the jeans look just fine. Maybe I should try that at other stores too. I'll just wheel back and forth in front of, say, a shoe store, and call out, "I need a nice black pump in a 6 1/2!" and they'll toss a box out the door to me, without even breaking my stride.

Luke seems to have broken free of a lot of the crankiness/adjustment issues he had over the summer and now he's just back to being good old Luke, only more so. I really think he might be preparing to run for office of some kind. Like on Sunday, when he delivered an impassioned speech about dogs to a small crowd of people waiting for tables at our local coffee shop. (There might have been something in there about health care too, but I lost track after a few of the big applause lines.) Or yesterday, at school, when I learned that he had invited all of the teachers and the maintenance man over for dinner ("Mackerel and sculpin and ham sandwiches").

In the late afternoons, we've started going over to our little elementary school because it's kind of a neighborhood kid-gathering place. Yesterday, Luke took off when we got there and I was amused to find him hanging out and chewing the fat with some much-bigger kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. By the time I got in on the conversation, he had already invited them over to our house to play. "I'll come!" said one kindergartner/future campaign volunteer. "OK," said Luke, "but I want that one to come too," - pointing to the biggest kid in the group, a second-grader three heads taller than Luke. One of our neighbors was laughing as he watched Luke work his way through the playground making sure that he knew everyone's name. "He's like the mayor of Morningside Drive," said Scott. That's kinda true. But when he starts asking for campaign contributions, we're in trouble.