Boys, crabs, stonings and the hormonal rush

October 24, 2010

The boys woke us up about 6AM. Two ravenous dogs. I knew they would be, without much supper and going straight to bed last night after we closed the shop and got home at 10:45PM.

They had a very active day yesterday, stoning crabs that crawled along the bottom of the seawall. They would run to the seashore, collect a pile of rocks and put them in the upturned bottoms of their shirts; sprint up the embankment, then another sprint 20 yards or so to throw the rocks back down to sea level, at the crabs. This went on for a couple of hours, the boys never relinquishing their sense of excitement over the possibility of dead crabs, at their hands.

Contemplating a stoning

You have to be a former boy to appreciate this sort of thing. Girls just don’t get it. Boys throwing rocks at anything that moves is just the manifestation of the male primal instinct to provide for the table. Girls and women can study about such things but they will never understand it the way we males do: In our guts. In our male apparatus. In the hormones that rush around in our brains, deceiving us into the thinking the world is ours to conquer.

It’s okay, ladies. We guys don’t understand an obsession with cleanliness and homemaking, either. And gossip, endless chatter, and crying over burnt toast. Is my male bias hanging out? Never mind! I’m being intentionally patronizing, sarcastic and condescending. It’s just to give you gals an inkling of the hormonal rush we guys get just before exterminating a thing or two.  That feeling is very similar to the righteous anger you probably now feel. Feel it? Yes? Tell the truth. It makes you want to grab hold of something and bend it to your will, doesn’t it?

Pictures lie!

Okay. Back to the boys. In addition to the necessary-for-emotional-growth stonings, the kids beat themselves and each other up over falling out of the hammock and who’s fault it was and who started it and all that kind of jazz. My Gods! Just like Glenn and me when we were that age - a world and fifty-some years away! Fists were flying. Giggles and tears followed each other, in a rambunctious tumble of the sweaty, and foolishly happy, Gab and his brother Derick. I was thrilled by it all.

That was yesterday. No one broke a bone or died, so we all woke up to a typical Sunday morning.

Shortly after peeing, I rode the bicycle to town for breakfast eggs, and ice for the cooler. When I got back, I made rice in the rice cooker and steamed eggs on top of the rice, in the basket that came with the cooker. Frederick ate four eggs, a cup and half of rice, six bananas and a slab of freshly fried tuna steak. Gab ate what he could scrounge after Derick and I claimed our lot. My wife kept her distance, and limbs and fingers as a result.