By the Sweat of Your Face You Shall Eat Bread..

"Daddy," N whispered to me in church this morning, "Be-member that I'm going to help you in the garage today."  N is all into helping and does so willingly and with great spirit.  We encourage it because generally it helps shame his sister into actually doing the one or two chores specifically laid out for her.  On Saturday the kids found me cleaning out my files for the new year, shredding old bills and receipts in my garage man-cave.  For L and N, few things incur the wide eyed glee of watching full 8½ by 11 sheets of paper go crinkling to their confettied demise.  I always get the full court plead for permission to feed in their own doomed docs.  N is the more conscientious of the two.  With L it's just a matter of time before she snags her hair or shirt sleeve or some other bodily accouterment and is dragged kicking and screaming into the gaping ¼-in slit that has been the bane of so many reams before her.  On Saturday we wiled away a minute or two pulverizing some old water bills before the task got old and fresher fare caught their interest, but N, ever the sensitive soul, promised me he would come back later and help me finish the task.

This afternoon as I headed out to the garage were I would be able to ignore the Super Bowl in peace and quiet I beckoned to N to come lend a hand (or finger or shirt collar or whatever he wanted to offer).  N is all sincerity, and his offers to help are anchored in the bottom of his heart, but he does possess all the focus and single-mindedness of the 5-year-old that he is.  He mounted the chair that brought him up high enough to reach the shredder and joyfully eviscerated a handful of old gas company bills and then quickly lost interest and started to find something else to keep himself occupied.  He was savoring the male man-cave bonding time, so he didn't want to go back in the house or out to the yard to play, but boredom takes a heavy toll on free spirits such as his.  I locked him down for another couple of minutes by pulling over a tall stool for him to climb up on.  The simple act of climbing up a stool and sitting a couple of feet above the floor is a joy and game that for we older, stoggier sort, has faded to the point where we are no longer capable of understanding all its inherent fascinations.  We quickly devolved into a scene that is probably replicated in garages world-wide on a regular basis - one guy mutely doing all the work, the other "assistant," ostensibly there to help, holding down a bench and yacking the first guy's ear off.

N's topics of conversation tend to be somewhat free ranging, stream-of-consciousness kinda stuff.  Were it not for the frequent "Don't you think so, Daddy?" pauses for acknowledgment to which I'm obliged to respond, I would likely have let him blur into the sound of the grinding shredder.  One topic seemed pretty pertinent as I was working through a pile of four-year-old credit card receipts.  "Daddy, if you don't have any money, you can't go to the bank and get any money, right?"

"That's right, N," I agreed.

"You have to get some money before the bank gives you any money," he explained, while I cocked my head and squinted at him, wondering exactly where this was coming from.

"And how do you get this money?" I asked, preparing a moralistic little jaunt down Work Ethic Lane.

"By going on walks and finding quarters." he replied.