“You know what the weirdest part about shitting in your own hand would be??”

*Blink*

“How heavy it would feel.”

“Uhhhno. I don’t think that would be the weirdest part about shitting in your own hand.”

Last Wednesday, Nate arose from his afternoon nap earlier than usual, so we were playing together downstairs, just the two of us. We started chasing each other through rooms, like one of those heavily-edited scenes from an old “Three Stooges” short… back and forth across the hallway, in one door, out another. Him leading one way, me leading the other. Run, Nate, run.

Whenever I’d stop to allow my lungs, each 38 years old, to catch up, Nate too would immediately stop, then go all ‘concerned man’ on me, and yell “Moooore!”. This last would be punctuated by an almost unconscious tapping together of his little hands, making the American Sign Language (ASL) accepted sign for “more”.

If he loves it, then there should be more. More tickle. More ‘choc’! More running. More chasing. More more.

I let the request hang there for a few seconds, and we just stared at each other - my expression fading, his remaining. Then, we were off again, the concern on his brow smoothing as it must in order to run and giggle without concern. He had his more.

And so it was, until it was not.

One thing you’ll notice if you spend more than four steps with Nate is that he has no regard for his surroundings, or his personal safety. Jill put it best when she said exasperatingly, “That kid is full-throttle, no padding!”

He usually spills out of doorways in a full sprawl, and often runs forward while looking backward. Running across the backyard, it looks like he’s constantly being taken down by unseen sniper fire. He careens through the hallways like a pinball, falling down and popping back up. Falling down, and popping back up. Even as he’s jack-knifing back up to his feet like the Son of Chucky, I’ll already be yelling to Jill about how many inches just randomly separated us from a raucous night at the ER, or a raucous night at home.

This night, it was to be the ER.

He was running in a forwardly direction but looking in a backwardly one. Heading north, and facing south. Suddenly, two things happened at once - I saw that a collision with my laptop table was imminent, and Nate tripped, which caused his prior forwardly and backwardly directions to converge into a single downwardly one. As he fell, he brought his head around.

From my position behind him, just as the front of his face became the back of his hair, his little head shuddered as his face chonked into the cutting edge of the table. He connected solidly, and went down hard. He lay there in complete silence for a beat, and then took in one great whooping breath, and began to shriek. Even as I scooped him up, I noticed that there was blood dripping from his mouth, and onto his shirt. I got him into the kitchen and tried to gently wipe everything off and survey the damage. It was bad, so I did what I normally do if there’s tissue exposed or if someone’s choking on something baked or fried.

“Buhbee! You need to come down here!” I yelled up the stairs.

Jill peered through the gore and concurred. Nate and I were off to the ER, with me driving not only in the Sequoia, but also in a cold sweat.

Nate had stopped crying about his ruined lip three minutes after his fall. For the next two hours, he was mostly interested only in thwarting my attempts to keep him off the waiting room’s bubonic play-gear, and in pointing to the hand sanitizer on the wall in the triage room, signing “more”, and gleefully yelling “Tizer!”.

Note: When applying antibacterial foam to Nate’s upturned palms, ensure that each hand contains a liberal amount. If, when he holds them up to your face, you are foolish enough to blow the Tizer from his hands, know that this outcome will be expected from that point on. If you blow it and it goes in his face, know that he will initially laugh, then point seriously to his eyes and say, “Hurt. Hurt eyes-th”.

More.

Nate was good when the doctor finally came in and performed what appeared to be a gynecological examination on his face. He opened his mouth obediently, and was generally calm and regarded the doctor with quiet, concerned-man curiosity.

“Ti-ZER!” He told the doctor.

The doctor looked at me. “What did he say?”

I explained about the tizer.

“Right. Okay, his teeth look fine. I don’t think they were involved.”

This came as a relief, as Jill and I both feared that they might have come through from the inside out, but were too whoomsey to look. The gaping part of the wound was oriented horizontally on the left side of his upper lip - the rest of it was just superficially scratched. It looked like half of a Snidley Whiplash mustache. I asked if he was going to have a scar there, expecting the doctor to laugh warmly and reassure me that he was only two, and, like a starfish, therefore possessed the ability to grow an entirely new face in the event of injury.

“Oh yes. He’ll definitely have a scar there.”

Shit. Maybe it will disappear over time.

“For the rest of his life.”

Shit.

“And I’m going to have to stitch up that lip.”

Sure thing. I’ll be behind those curtains with my shoes in my ears.

“I’m going to need you to hold him down.”

Dagger.

I held him down while a burly orderly held his head in place. Nate screamed like a crash-test monkey in a jet propulsion lab. That is, until the doctor gave him a shot of Novocain, at which time his screaming reached a level previously unmatched in the long history of Frederick Memorial, and with an urgency approximating the brass steam whistles atop locomotives in the Old West. He screamed so loudly that I couldn’t even hear myself assuring him that everything was okay, and that there was no need to scream so loudly.

Three stitches and approximately four years later, the doctor rolled his chair back and announced that it had stitched together tighter than he’d thought it would, actually.

Now free, Nate clung to me and glared at Dr. Scar.

“Bye-bye!” He said, dismissing him.

Then, he looked down at the bed we’d held him into. “Bad!” he said, with a wave of his hand.

Finally, he looked at me. “Muh-mum and Sam Home!” Muh-mum, Sam, and home… no Liam.

And home we went, to disregarded bedtimes, Muh-mum, Sam, (Liam), and a waiting dinner of non-salty, non-spicy macaroni, juice, and Stove-Top Stuffing - made to order by Muh-mum, who had been in constant contact with us throughout the ordeal.

Liam, who must have been quizzing Muh-mum as to Nate’s whereabouts during our absence, solemnly contemplated Nate’s stitches, looked up at us, and said, “Act-ually, Naynay has stitches.”

Yes, he does.

Later, Jill attempted to put Nate into his pajama top without raking his stitches. Just as his head popped out through the neck hole, he happily shouted, “Boom!”, and we laughed the laughs of parents both amused and relieved.

Jill said, “Yep, you’re a Boomer. Hey Boomer!”

Boomer just stood there, beaming and smiling his whiplash smile… beaming and somehow not falling, and his face told me that there would most certainly be more.

Much more.

So we’re back in both Maryland, and our daily routines. In fact, we’ve been back for a week now. South Carolina was a hard scene… thanks to everyone for the emails, phone calls, and support. There’s a lot more to say about Senior, but not tonight.

Senior was large. He contained multitudes.

We love you, Dad.

Senior isn’t doing well.

There was a time, long ago. It didn’t seem so long ago then, but looking back on it now, it was. Jill and I had not yet met, so it was back when I was just www.billand.com, and she was www.andjill.com. I lived in a brand-new townhouse. Apparently, I did not live alone.

The noise overhead sounded, to me, like a squirrel trying to bury a nut in my attic.

Curious. It was coming from just on the other side of the bathroom ceiling drywall - the drywall that prevented the top of my bathroom from being the bottom of my attic. I stood and balanced on the edge of the tub, stretched up, and put my ear to the paint.

Scratcha… Scratcha… Scratcha… Scratch.

I lowered down and straightened up, puzzled. I located what I estimated to be the area directly below the possible squirrel, and gave him a good, solid thump in the nuts. I was certain that would immediately send any squirrel up and over, and back out into the world like a small, hairy base jumper. However, upon being thumped, the noise only got a little louder, and a little faster.

Scratcha-scratcha-scratcha-scratch!

Additionally, that area of the ceiling didn’t feel very much like solid drywall. It felt drawn and tight, like a snare drum.

I decided to investigate. The attic was accessible only via a hole in the ceiling of my bedroom closet, so I pulled a stepladder into it and started up. In case of trouble, I carried at my side a single corn-straw broom in one hand, and my Mag-lite in the other. If my aim were true, these would surely protect me against any somersaulting kung-fu squirrels left behind to guard the nutpile.

Everything up there was joists, rafters, drywall backing, and pink insulation. There were also a fair amount of nail-tips coming down through the ceiling – sharp and pokey and just right for snagging eyelids or popping scalps. If lost track of, they’d also be perfect for punching right through temples and penetrating blood-brain barriers that protect your brain from the things that aren’t your brain.

I performed a tightrope act from one joist to the other, and slowly navigated my way across the attic, over unsupported drywall and below galvanized braindeath, to the space above my bathroom. I stopped and listened intently.

Nothing.

I started to step over a large roll of insulation, and glanced over it to pick my spot on the other side. Suddenly, the arc of my flashlight played across something small and quite horrible… Something that left me frozen. Frozen, in spite of the more than adequate R-49 insulation all around me.

It was a single, busy bee.

Only he wasn’t really single. Hidden behind the roll of insulation, I now noticed a moving map of bees fuming and jitterbugging over a softball-sized hive that was growing out of a thin spot on the top of my drywall. With little regard for my blood-brain barrier, I turned spasmodically and began to GET ON UP OUTTA THERE.

I held onto my now-useless corn-straw broom as I successfully bolted across the attic framework I had so carefully traversed only moments earlier. I think I once saw Daffy Duck sprinting in the very same way across lily pads as he ran from an alligator. Had I stepped on the unsupported drywall between joists, then I think the best vantage point to really appreciate my powdery descent through the ceiling would have been from my bedroom chair, over by the windows.

I managed to make it back down the ladder, and quickly pulled the attic door closed above me.

So, that strange sound had less to do with a thrifty squirrel than it did a writhing knot of angry bees, busily dismantling my drywall from the inside out, and repurposing it for the hive collective.

Safe once again, I stood on the edge of the bathtub and rethumped the ceiling.

ZZzzzz-ZZzzzz-ZZzzzz-ZZzzzz!

In the new context given me by the bees, I appreciated this now unmistakably buzzy sound. What previously had sounded like a scratchy squirrel now sounded a lot more like stingy bees. In fact, I could hear them up there perfectly… tapping their segmented thoraxes into one another in an orgy of non-mammalian exo-skeletonism.

I called an exterminator, but he wanted too much money. So, I decided to take care of the infestation myself. First, I would need a bee suit. For reasons that seemed valid at the time, I decided that the best way to make a bee suit myself would be to fashion it from garbage bags, duct tape, and an old screen door.

This idea, while beautiful in its simplicity, failed in its execution. So I approached the problem from a different angle. What if, instead of making one large bee suit for myself, I made hundreds of smaller bee suits for them? This seemed like the way to go. I began to craft scores of miniature bee suits. Each one had a little extra padding in the back of each pair of pants for keeping stingers from poking through to the outside, and subsequently, into me.

I waited until nightfall, when I knew all the bees would be asleep, and then I quietly climbed the ladder and reentered the attic. I made my way stealthily over to the hive, and sure enough, they were all asleep. I began the tedious task of gently slipping a tiny pair of pants and a bee suit onto each sleeping bee. Once I was done, I snuck back out of the attic, and down the ladder. Exhausted, I slept.

I awoke suddenly, and realized that it was morning. I wasn’t sure what time bees wake up, but I thought it best to have the element of surprise on my side. Without fear, I confidently climbed the ladder and entered the attic for the third time.

“All bees! Wake up!” I shouted. “You’re leaving!”

They swarmed me immediately. They landed on my arms, neck, and face. They crawled in my hair, and even up my pantlegs. I could feel them everywhere, tapping me with their little bee pants. Yep, they were trying to sting me, but they couldn’t. Instead, it was like, tap, tap, tap.

. . .

Oh my god. You should have seen your face! You totally believed me!

I didn’t put pants on bees, dude.