Straight No Chaser

Manchild

we've gotten him to the point where he remembers his phone, now. freshman and sophomore years, almost anywhere he went that was over five miles from campus, he would invariably leave his phone sitting right on his pillow, where he'd always put it so he "wouldn't forget." he doesn't do that anymore. he forgets his charger instead, leaving himself with three bars of battery life to last eleven days, meaning the only phone call we get, for those eleven days, is the one that came yesterday: "hey, just had to tell you i left my charger in atlanta, so i'm conserving my bars...but we'll talk when i fly back."

okay, okay, fine. i'm not pissed. it's just another minor addition to the growing list of reasons i find him frighteningly accident- and misfortune-prone, these days. before this, the most recent fuckup was leaving his dorm room unlocked so that both his laptop and his guitar (the one i bought him for his birthday) got stolen.

before that, there was getting a huge piece of barbecued chicken stuck in his esophagus, blocking his pipes so that for the next twenty-four hours, everything he put in his mouth came back out the same way. (the same thing happened to my mom with a hunk of beef, two years ago; she had to go to the emergency room and have a procedure done to get it pushed down. marcus, instead, got one of his friends to heimlich him and it popped back out, a whole night and a day later.)

before that, there was the thing that happened in the car.

before that, there was attempting to climb over a jagged wrought-iron fence, only to get the skin of his index finger snagged on one of the spikey upturned points. he broke the tendon and had to wear a cast practically forever, then do all this hysterical "finger therapy"--tiny little bends, a thousand reps. it's still only ninety percent usable, which is supposedly as good as it'll ever be again.

we won't even get into all the asthma attacks, missed flights, necessary items left behind in various places, or what happened to us on the way to texas. you get the idea.

if we ever get married, i'm going to watch him very carefully around the babies.