and really might well do if I left him alone in the house for twenty minutes, a partial list:
- turn on the burner, light things on fire.
- shave off all his hair, put it in the sink to clog it up. a trick that’s not funny, never been funny, never will be funny.
- put physical pressure on the cat — just put both his hands on the side of the cat and sort of gently press in until the cat says “meew.”
And that’s why I won’t be leaving him alone in the house while I go to get coffee this morning.
Anything you fear he might do?
I fear he might get loose in the recording studio and do some precociously brilliant Prince-type thing. Who wants that from a 6-year-old? It’d just embarrass the rest of us.
oh, it’s no secret, my friend: when you’re not there, he takes your calls. he had to stand on a chair to get in on the groundfloor when he was three, and now the vortex portfolio is too vast for the human mind to encompass.
read this
When you are not around, he bathes in yogurt and conducts surreal phone conversations with deli products. But, I think you suspected this already . . .
Two words – home chemistry.
Write poetry.
Fall down, strike his head on the corner of the table, find that he’s not bleeding and that that was a really interesting altered state of mind.
Put emotional pressure on the cat. “You’ll never be good enough. You call that a mouse? I work and I work, and all you do is sit around the house and sleep!”
Decide this is a good day to see if they’ll let him play in that house two blocks away, the one with the little boy playing in the yard and *two* Big Wheels on the porch, the one he has seen two hundred times coming and going but never been allowed to knock on before.
(No, wait, that last one was mine at three, not yours at six.)
Eat cheese until he literally bursts. Literally.
At 6, my son, now 29, a Harvard grad, and accomplished blues harmonica player, sprayed every bedroom in our home with a fire extinguisher. Good luck getting that crap off the walls.
At six — home alone — it could be a movie. Hey, wait a minute…I love how you capture his little mechanical mind. Left alone, mine would eat Spicy Hot CHeetos without cease, would leave the doors open, sit on the back of the couch, jump up and down and definitely use his new Nerf rocket/grenade launcher in the living room. And probably, just once, go into his sister’s room and just stare in awe, as if at the Holy of Holies.