Time Slips By Disturbingly Quick Boys

“Time slips by disturbingly quick boys,” said my father as he fumbled with the assembly instructions for the balsa wood P-51 Mustang he was building. “You say to yourself, ‘I’ll work on that tomorrow,’ and the next thing you know three months of tomorrows zip right on by… where the hell’s that aileron?”

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon. Scooter and I were playing with our Matchbox cars on the basement floor using cardboard boxes we had cut up with steak knives as houses and buildings. My father stood at his workbench vainly trying to remember where he left off on his model.

“Lucius, where’s my X-Acto knife?” he asked as he fumbled through the box of unassembled plane parts.

“I dunno.”

“Ah, here it is. Aw, dammit.”

I looked over to see my father trying to pry the X-Acto knife that had firmly stuck to the glue bottle in the intervening months since he last worked on his project.

“Shit. Jesus,” cursed my father as he sliced his finger open. “God dammit.”

Lucius van Dyke II pointed his bloody finger at Scooter and I.

“This is why you shouldn’t put things off,” he said and retreated up the basement stairs to retrieve a bandage from the bathroom.

I looked over at Scooter and shrugged. This was nothing unusual. My father was easily distracted by the latest new project, starting the next before finishing the last. The sheer abundance of unfinished projects in our household numbered in the thousands.

Scooter rolled his Thunderbird into the parking lot outside his cardboard house, a lot that was filled with a VW bus, a Mercedes convertible, a Ducatti, and the Mystery Machine, the van from Scooby Doo.

“When I grow up I want to be a car dealer that way I can drive a different car every day,” said Scooter.

“When I grow up, I want a house with a big swimming pool,” I said.

“With a slide!” interjected Scooter.

“With a slide and a waterfall!”

“Yeah!”

“And behind the waterfall will be a cave that’ll be our clubhouse that no one will know about.”

“Yeah! And we’ll have video games!” said Scooter excitedly.

“Pac Man, Galaga, Dig Dug… We’ll have all the good ones.”

“And then…”

“Boys!” came my mother’s voice down the basement stairwell. “Come on upstairs. I need to take your father to the hospital for some stitches. You’ll have to stay over at Mrs. Baker’s for a little while.”

Scooter and I looked at each other with the pain and anguish that can only be expressed in the faces of eight and nine year old boys faced with the prospect of spending a rainy Sunday afternoon in the company of a seventy-six year old woman who did not own a television.