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“Have you had The Talk with him yet?”  Gwendolyn rarely asked Jim questions she didn’t already know the answer to.  That’s one of the things that both amazed Jim about her and absolutely drove him bat-shit crazy at the same time.  It seemed passive aggressive.

Jim folded his Saturday edition of the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch and laid it down on the Formica dinette where they sat having their Saturday morning coffee.  “No, I haven’t.”

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“Timmy has been rubbing himself on the furniture.  He’s been spending more time in the bathroom.  I’m afraid he’s going to try something with the dog if you don’t have The Talk and help him understand the changes he’s going through,” Gwendolyn said.

And of course Jim knew she was right.  Heck, she was always right.  That didn’t make it any easier.  

Jim and Gwendolyn had been married a dozen years.  Timmy was going on 11.  Jim had worked himself into a management position at The Facility by always looking busy, never using all of his days off, and being promoted to the position of Grammar Fascist. Overseeing a crew of four who were responsible for proofreading all of the press releases, company reports, job postings, personnel reviews, and annual statements was demanding work.  He’d started at an entry level position, being in charge of the Oxford Comma.  But, when it became obvious he was a punctuation prodigy, he was promoted to Assistant Manager in charge of colons and semi-colons, a big step up from commas.

The former Grammar Fascist, Emily Everman, was killed in a random accident involving the mimeograph machine and a Grape-Nehi.  It seems that the highly toxic purple mimeograph ink somehow made its way into an empty soft drink bottle and was accidentally consumed. Unfortunately it happened on a weekend when she’d come in to proofread and print the quarterly sales reports for the Prosthetics Division and there was nobody else in the office that could have helped save her.  By the time she was found Monday morning she was not only tense, she was past tense.  As a result, Jim was promoted to her position and the company didn’t find out for another six months that they were losing an arm and a leg in artificial limbs.

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Anyway, as they sat at the kitchen table, Gwendolyn let it be known in her own subtle way that until Jim had The Talk with their son there would be no way she would be baking any Rice Krispie Treats.  And while she had never been that good in the kitchen anyway, the thought of no desserts at all was enough to motivate Jim to promise the results she was looking for.  “I’ve got to go to the grocery store.  I’ll take Timmy with me.  We’ll have The Talk while we’re gone.”  He had a little bit of a tone in his voice, which made Gwendolyn tap her nails on the Formica in a way that made the hair on the back of Jim’s neck stand up.

“Fine,” she said.  It wasn’t, but that’s what she said and Jim was long past arguing.

Jim found Timmy in his room, dry humping the bean bag chair they’d given him for Christmas.  “We’re heading to the store in ten minutes.  Finish up whatever you’re in the middle of so you can come with me.  We might even stop by the Dairy Twin for a soft-serve cone afterwards if you want.”

Jim went out the garage and backed out the new 1960 Ford Country Squire wagon from the single car garage of the ranch home they’d purchased in RoadRunner Estates three years earlier.  Of course, Jim had wanted to get the less expensive Country Sedan wagon model.  The upgraded Country Squire went for nearly $300 more and stretched their new car budget to the absolute limit.  When they were sitting at Roger’s desk just off the showroom of Frontier Ford, “Home of the Straight Shootin’ Deal,” Gwendolyn said, “I have resigned myself to accepting the lack of wood in the bedroom, I’m not going to do the same thing in the garage.  I WANT the Country Squire!”   She tapped her fingernails on Roger’s oak desk while Jim signed the credit application and avoided eye contact with either of them.

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“Let’s go Timmy!”  Jim yelled as he headed out the front door towards the top-of-the-line Ford.  Timmy ran past him, opened the driver’s side door, and crawled into the bright red cabin of the big wagon, standing up in the middle of the wide bench seat.  Of course there were no seatbelts.  It was long before the government reached the long arm of legislation down into the design of new cars. Parents were left to their own devices as to how to protect their progeny.  Most left it to fate and took their chances.  The Pill was still in its developmental phase. Condoms were dicey at best.  The Pull Out method of contraception was the most popular.  Some considered the potential risk of death to a child due to fairly minor traffic accidents as just another form of family planning involving chance.

Once at the Piggly Wiggly, Jim got a shopping cart and began filling it with the list of items he’d jotted down on the small note folded in his shirt pocket.  No one else would even see that the block-printed words were correctly spelled and included punctuation that was flawless.  The apostrophe in “Campbell’s Pork & Beans” was something a lot of people would have left out, but not Jim.  Such were the details that made his career. He spent quite a bit of time in the Produce Department, looking for exactly what he wanted.

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Timmy was well behaved the entire time, not wanting to risk the prize of a soft serve cone by doing anything unruly.  He walked beside his father up and down every aisle.  Jim looked down on him, regretting the boy was no longer small enough to be placed in the child seat portion of the basket facing him, and thinking about The Talk.

The two of them walked the aisles of the Piggly Wiggly. Other customers viewing them from a distance thought they looked a bit like a Norman Rockwell painting, a microcosm of the American Dream taking place right there in Fort Stockton.  At the checkout counter, the kind lady with graying hair looked at Timmy and considered giving him one of the lollipops she kept in a small brown bag under the register.  But then, she saw that he was taller than the last time he’d come in.  Different, in some way.  Maybe too old for a lollipop.  She shoved all the purchases down to the bag-boy at the end of the counter.  He wasn’t that much older than Timmy, it seemed.

Just outside the automatic sliding glass doors to the store, Jim and Timmy stopped at the coin operated Falgas Speedy Launch Children’s Boat Ride just this side of the display of charcoal briquettes and barbecue grills.  Jim noted the navigation lights, two-spoke steering wheel, cleats, chrome handrail, brass propeller, aluminum trim, faux air-scoop, and speaker system that played simulated engine noises on the faux wood boat.  Timmy had always loved the ride, but was all of a sudden too big for it now.

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“Do you remember how much you enjoyed riding this not too long ago?” Jim asked his son.  Timmy nodded.

“Do you remember the thrill you’d get with the anticipation of just being able to experience it?”

“I sure do, Dad,” Timmy said.

“During the ride, do you remember how your stomach felt as you felt the ride go up and down and rock back and forth?” Jim recalled.  Timmy just smiled.

“And do you remember how satisfied you felt when the ride was over, but how much you were already thinking about the next time?” Jim said.

“Sure do,” Timmy replied.

Jim grabbed the large pumpkin on the bottom rack of the cart and pulled it out.  “Those days aren’t gone forever. They’re just on hold for a bit.”  The bags of groceries went in the back of the Country Squire, right up against the tailgate.  The pumpkin rode between them all the way home.  The Talk wasn’t as good as the soft serve cone, but it stayed with Timmy a lot longer.

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Pulling the Country Squire into the garage, Timmy ran back into the house.  He flew right past Gwendolyn, into his room, and closed the door.  Jim brought in the bags of groceries and set them on the counter for Gwendolyn to unload and put away where they belonged.  When she looked at him, he just winked.  Back in the garage, as he grabbed the last of the brown paper bags full of groceries, Jim closed the tailgate on the Country Squire.  

He took the pumpkin out and placed it under his workbench, turned discreetly towards the wall, right next to the large jug of mimeograph ink and the empty Ne-Hi bottles.

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