Friday, November 06, 2009

No Dick Tracy! No Dick Tracy!

At one point the summer I was fifteen, there were eight or nine children living at our house. Maybe not all at once. But there certainly seemed to be a lot of kids there. And a lot of doing things that kids do, not bad things, just things that aren't very considerate of other people who have to cook, clean, do laundry, share the same space, etc. And my mother might have had a nervous breakdown or two, threatening to withold certain outings, one of them being the movie Dick Tracy.

We still make fun of her. "No Dick Tracy! No Dick Tracy!"

I managed to see the movie twice that summer, don't ask me how.

Really, this post has a relevant, more recent point.

In the movie Dick Tracy, there is a little boy who is constantly eating. As soon as he finishes one thing he tosses the container of his shoulder and shouts out "When do we eat?"

This is Nathan.

Five minutes after a snack or a meal, he tells me he's hungry. If I do not respond in some way, he usually manages to steal something out of the fruit bowl - a pear. A tomato. And this afternoon, a lemon.

And each time I track him down and wrestle the lemon out of his hands, or pick up a tomato to cook with and find it riddled with teeth marks, I feel like shouting. "No Dick Tracy! No Dick Tracy!"

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