Saturday visit

Man and the Twins are students from my after-school program. The fourth-grader has a real name, but his family calls him “Man.” I prefer to call him T-Bone. The twins, who are in kindergarten, also have individual names for their individual personalities, but their family dubs them “Twins.” Singularly, each is called “Twin.” For instance, I heard a neighbor yell at one of them, “Twin, quit messing with my dog!” I wonder if the boys’ sisters will be called “Girl” and “Baby Girl.”

On a rainy Saturday, they walked with me across the highway overpass from their house to mine. I grasped the twins’ hands as tightly as they grasped brown-bagged lunches. While I was alerting the twins to the bocce-ball-sized dog poop in front of the defunct Mexican restaurant, T-Bone shouted, “Twin! You’re losing your lunch.” He looked down at his ripped bag, and we turned to see a Ziplock of Oreos and sealed cup of applesauce spaced down the sidewalk like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs.

When we arrived at my house, they ate bologna on white, cookies, and applesauce. The twin whose lunch was scattered on the sidewalk realized that his Capri Sun was missing. “It’s okay,” I told him as I looked in the refrigerator, “we have milk… uh, water…” I saw the old bottle of pineapple juice and offered him a glass.

“Apple?” he asked hopefully.

“No. This is pineapple. You might want to try a little bit to see if you like it.”

He liked it. The boys sat at the table and ate until they were hyper. My planned afternoon of baking cookies, watching a movie, and making popcorn changed as they hurtled over the couch and threw my books at each other. I lost my calm arrogance and turned into some poor dupe on Nanny 911. I took a breath and turned to the one jumping over the couch, “That’s strike one for you.” He looked at me with wide eyes, not believing that I would use the after-school lingo of three strikes and a time-out on this special weekend visit.

Not missing a beat, however, he went into his usual teary melodrama, “Just one more chance, please. Just one more chance,” before I suggested we all go outside and play a game.

The “game” started with sprinting races across my narrow, ten-foot lawn. Next, I suggested we have a jumping jack competition. After a few pushups, T-Bone was onto my ploy and asked if I had a football. Nope. Frisbee? Broken. A weight-lifting bench? In fact we do have a weight machine in the dirt-floor basement.

After they bashed the weights for an hour, T-Bone asked if we could have a scavenger hunt. “Well, I haven’t made clues and our yard is so small…”

“You can just hide something and we have to find it.” Obviously. T-Bone suggested candy or chocolate. All I could find was a box of garlic Triskets. Each time they found the treasure, they’d get one Trisket each. After discovering the garlic crackers in places like the mailbox, the woodpile, and the back of a pickup truck, the twins decided to hide them for T-Bone and me to find. We searched for forty-minutes before they unearthed the bag from a flowerpot. I didn’t want a prize Trisket after that.

On the way home, I suggested we stop at Family Dollar to get a wiffle-ball set. Only one of them had a temper tandrum and sprawled himself on the floor when I wouldn’t buy Batman toys. His mood changed when he found his missing Capri Sun (straw and all) on the sidewalk.