The only light you’ll see

I wrote a note to The Captain’s teacher and vice principal today. Actually, I wrote the note yesterday, but guess who forgot to give it to his teacher until this morning?

On my way to work, I got a call from the vice principal who, chuckling, said he’d received the note and that it was the best note he’d seen and that it had the entire staff laughing. I bade him well and thanked him for his hard work wrangling 400 K-8 children, and then wondered what the hell I’d written in that note.

I knew what it was *about*. And I wrote it *less than 48 hours ago*. Someday, if I ever have a book published, I will be the sort of person who pulls my own book off the shelf and is completely surprised by every aspect of it, from the cover to the ending. Because I will have utterly forgotten that I wrote it.

Fast forward five minutes. His Nibs calls to tell me that The Nipper, who has been puking every half hour since midnight, is feeling better and is watching a movie (I know; I set him up in front of the boob tube while His Nibs passed out at 7am) and had I called the school?

“You know, that’s a strange thing. I did call the school, and told them The Nipper would be wallowing in the effluvia of his own digestive tract today, but then the vice principal called me back…”

“Uh-oh,” His Nibs said. Rightly so. Usually the only time the vice principal calls is when someone has shot someone’s eye out with a Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time. Or when someone has barfed all over himself in class. Or when someone else has decided that the little turd calling everyone “gay” on the playground really needs to learn what “gay” really means and gleefully punches the snot out of him while explaining that if you use “gay” to mean anything other than “happy”, you’re being a homophobic bully. At which point the homophobic bully replies with “whatever, faggot”, and the gleeful punching of snot stops being gleeful and starts being Serious Punching Business.

ANYWAY.

So I says to His Nibs, I says, “Your Nibs, I haven’t a frigging clue what I wrote in the note to the vice principal, but he seems to have got a good chortle out of it. I *think* it was something funny, regarding having our permission to leave school property to go for lunch with his buddies at the sandwich shoppe, but I can’t remember if it was a veiled reference to what might happen to him if instead of returning to school, he hangs out with his buddies by the train tracks poking a dead body (a bunch of teenagers show up and then one of his buddies pulls a frigging gun on them, and that’s just not safe. See above, with the Red Ryder), or whether I’d mentioned something about if he’s late coming back, the school has our permission to get The Captain to clean all the whiteboards with his tongue.”

“Uh, neither,” His Nibs said. “You wrote that The Captain has our permission to leave school property to go to the sandwich shoppe for lunch today, but that if he’s late getting back, the school is to inform him he won’t be going to the sandwich shoppe again until he’s thirty-five. And that if he’s still living at home when he’s thirty-five, we will have bigger fish to fry. Normally your attempts at humour are just kind of silly, but that one was quite good, I thought.”

“Ah yes. I remember now. And I wrote it on the Star Trek paper, did I not?”

His Nibs: “SIGH”