Adventures In Writing

Got Spleen?

My wife is in the process of turning one of the bedrooms into my new home office. It's a mass of destruction at the moment, but I have to admit that I'm looking forward to it.

For twenty years, I've lived and worked in a windowless garage conversion, adrift from the rest of the family and barricaded by the washer and dryer. People have had to shout back to me to get my attention. I think the distance was good when the kids were small. There were five of them, after all, and the house got noisy.

However, my nineteen-year-old just moved out a few weeks ago and my wife decided I needed an office with windows. I didn't feel that way, but as I've listened to what she's got planned, I'm getting pumped. Can't wait.

But -- my ten-year-old's bed was in there (he's getting the bigger room, but that's okay with me). So she asked Chandler to help take the bed apart. Primarily the screws on the lower section of the bed.

I have to pause a moment to tell you about my ten-year-old in case you're new to this blog. Chandler is precocious, articulate, and way intelligent. We just found out he's got a touch of Aspergers, which gives him his mutant ability of hyper-focus and tendency to get overly involved in thinking things through. And his IQ is higher than mine.

At any rate, he gets exposed to a lot of information. I read to him every night, and not the slower pace of an audio book, but as fast as I can go. He's learned to keep up and anticipate. (I'm ADHD, and he is too, so my wife says listening to us read and talk about a book is like walking into a buzzsaw.)

He loves words. Absolutely loves them. He tries them out when he hears/reads them, and asks me for definitions. I love words too, so usually I'm able to answer his questions. When I was little, I tried out words I heard too. Usually got my mouth washed out with soap, but Chandler hangs around a better crowd than I did.

But yesterday he was helping his mom and he got frustrated. He told her that the screws were too low and the position was making his SPLEEN hurt. My wife and I got a good laugh out of that and wondered where he heard the word. It hadn't been in anything I'd read to him lately.

Later that evening, we were on the way to his karate practice. He was drinking cranberry juice because we thought he had a mild bladder infection. He didn't care for the cranberry juice and said he thought it was going to make him sick. I told him that he'd know he was sick if the juice made his SPLEEN hurt.

He flashed me that look of knowing disgust that he has down so perfectly, then said, "I know what a spleen is."

"Oh yeah?" I challenged (I can't resist a good debate with him, especially when I know I'm going to win. Not very mature, I admit, but my immaturity keeps us close at times too).

"Yeah," he said. "It's that bone in your back that helps you stand up straight."

I died laughing, then explained that was the SPINE, not the SPLEEN. But the pain he claimed earlier made sense at that point.