Letter by Letter

After our day at the beach, we returned home and had some dinner. I had a salad, as is usually my wont when Kiernan and I are on our own. I think I made him some pasta. That's always a good guess, as pasta is two of the three things he will eat these days. Those three things being pasta, rice, and pasta.

No, I don't have any idea where he gets his protein. Space aliens maybe? Reading about dinosaurs? You can get protein from reading, right? As long as the subject is meat-eaters. Yeah, I think I'm gonna go with that.

At any rate, it was about midway through the meal and I was trying to avoid telling a story. Kiernan is back on a stories-at-dinnertime kick, especially when it's just the two of us. I tell these stories about him being a detective who solves intergalactic mysteries with the help of the dwarf planet Eris and its satellite Dysnomia. We did this every night for awhile but it stopped for a few months for some reason. Maybe because of traveling. Maybe Kiernan lost interest. I don't know for sure. But a couple of weeks ago Kiernan asked me to start up again, and then after a couple of days he asked me to tell a story about dinosaurs during dinner. I don't think he was intending for me to do this, but I just incorporated dinosaurs into the detective stories. How, you might ask? By using that tried and true get-out-of-jail-free card all lazy writers have in their arsenals: time-traveling!

Well, the rejiggered stories were an instant hit. I enjoy telling them too, but not every night. Making up stories on the fly is fun, but also fairly tiring. And on this day, after five or six hours toiling in the sand at the beach, I just was not in the mood. So I tried distracting him with questions about the day.

He knew what I was up to but went along, showing mercy. At one point he noticed the bowl I was using for my salad, a bowl that is a little monument to one of my favorite meals, artichokes. He started playing with the word.

"What if you took off the 's', Daddy? What would you have?"

"Well," I said. "Artichoke."

He smiled. "What if you took off the 'e'?"

"Artichok."

He laughed. "What if you took off the 'k'?"

Before I could reply he said, with glee, "Articho!" We both found this quite funny.

He went on down until the word had been dismantled. Then he turned his attention to the watering can over near the hose (we were eating outside) and started taking apart that word.

I have no idea why he decided to do this or why it was so amusing, but he did and it was. And that's all this post is about.