home for the summer

I love my son.  I love spending time with him; I actually enjoy his company.  He is, among many other things, very funny.   Like the other day.  We were on a crowded bus.  I was seated and a woman with a butt the size of two huge watermelons was pushed against me.  Her butt was in my face.  Literally and disgustingly.  She was oblivious.  I kept my nose in my book and occasionally nudged her with my elbow.  Alexander was standing and observing all this.  I hadn’t realized when she exited the bus, but I looked up from my book when another butt (albeit a much smaller one) was shoved again into my face.  It was Alexander and he had wordlessly observed my prior encounter.  I burst out laughing.  So he’s fun.

But there are other things I’ve noticed since he’s been home from college:

• I am constantly fluffing my sofa pillows.  He sits on the sofa, gets up, and wherever the pillows are they stay there. 
• I go through about a roll of toilet paper a day. 
• The soap in the bathroom dispenser is constantly running out.
• Food…he easily eats more than twice as much as I do.
• The dishwasher needs to be run at least once a day; he never notices when it’s full.
• A second air conditioner (even when its not needed) runs every night.
• Getting him to make his bed every morning requires a herculean effort.
• Hourly, it seems, I hear, “I need money for……” haircuts, metro card, shampoo ("I hate the girly one that’s in the bathroom"), new sneakers (his $150 ones that we bought last June are separating at the sole and cannot be fixed), more mozzarella cheese, more bread, more mango sorbet, etc. etc.
• Clothes pile up in Alexander’s small room;  moving clothes from on top of the laundry basket to inside it is perhaps too difficult.
• I like to make sure Alexander is in safely each night, so I try and stay up…then when it’s late I call and then he tells me he’s walking home from a nearby friend’s but its late and after all it is New York City, not Ithaca, and then we get into an argument; at least at school I don’t know.
• I ask him to do something, and then I need to ask him again and again and then he accuses me of nagging or yapping (his new favorite word for me).
• Things get used up without my knowing.  I go to get a Q-Tip today and we have none.
• Shoes stay in the living room, not in his bedroom where they belong.
• He never knows if he’ll be eating dinner with me, so I’m on hold, and IF his friends aren’t around, or IF he doesn’t feel like spending his hard-earned money, I might get a call around 4:30, “Hey, what’s for dinner?”

And that I just love!