The Night Max Finally Wrote the Title to my Children's Book

 I won't bore you with the details; suffice it to say, today's adventures involved a broken stove (in our house), craigslist, an unbroken stove (in someone else's garage), a hundred bucks, two trips to the hardware store and a nervous wife who probably felt like she was getting updates from those fuzzy communiques in the first edition of "Myst": "Honey, I found a new sto. . garbled static . . just need. . . static. . .bungee cords. . . static. . . gas lines don't fit. . . static. . . a few parts. . . static. . hardware store. . . if it works. . .static. . . make Miles a pizza. . . static . . . garage painted red" And we wonder why Katie puts child services on alert when she leaves the boys with me.

Finally, finally, when the stove was installed and the pizza was baking, Max suggested we eat dinner outside in the dark. We made a game of tripping the motion detector on the yard light so Max didn't mix up his soy milk with dad's well-earned beer and Miles passed me star-lit pepperonis from his pizza slices. At the end, when it was bath-time, Max began his traditional whirling dervish chant exulting the night time.

Tonight, though, he pulled a large black, plastic, serving-type spoon out of the sand box, tossed it in the air and proclaimed: "I just made a wish with my wishing spoon!"

Me (pretty much drunk) "What?"

"This, daddy, is my Wishing Spoon!"

"Your Wishing Spoon? Do you have to throw it up in the air to make the wish?"

"Yeah, I throw it up into the air and. . I. . .makeawish!" He punctuates this by, again, throwing the spoon into the night air.

"What did you just wish for?"

Devilishly: "I wished for a tornado!"

"Yeah, that seems like fun in theory, Max. But, really, in practice, it's kind of scary."

"Oh, daddy."

So, folks, look for it at your local bookstore or in the "buy-this-out-of-pity-for-the-author" section of Amazon in a few years: "The Wishing Spoon" by Max's Tired, Drunk Daddy.