And Now For Something Completely Different

Fans of Sentence of Dave know my son eight year old son Ian as a foul-mouthed candy-hoarder who once "betrayed the family" with a premeditated second floor flood, but apparently there's more going on in his head than profanity and malevolence . . . Tuesday morning, Ian was searching for something, and he looked distraught, so my wife asked him what he was looking for and offered to help him, but at first he wouldn't tell her what he was looking for and refused her aid, but my wife persisted and he finally said, "I can't find a letter . . . it's on a white piece of paper" and my wife remembered seeing this protruding from his desk drawer, and she had pushed it into the desk -- so she found it for him, and he seemed relieved . . . and rather secretive about it, so later that day, when Ian wasn't around, she went upstairs and looked at the letter and then showed it to me; it was a Mother's Day card to my mother-in-law-- who lived with us in an apartment in our basement for many years and looked after our kids until she passed away from cancer in the summer of 2012; Ian was very close with her and misses her very much, and this card expressed that sentiment in a rather unusual way . . . it was a Mother's Day card addressed to "Nanny" and thanked her for playing games with him and giving him treats but the writing was childish and sloppy and the paper was crumpled and at the bottom something was crossed out and the year "2009" was written in the lower right corner . . . and I looked carefully and was able to decipher the phrase that was crossed out and it said "4 years ago" and I realized what he had done -- he created an artifact; though he had written this note recently, he wanted it to be from when he was four years old and Nanny was still alive, and so he aged it and wrote with childish handwriting, and then he wrote the four years ago phrase and then realized that people didn't write that to date a letter, they put the actual year, so he crossed it out and wrote "2009" . . . and after we looked at the letter (and were appropriately choked up over it) we put it back in his desk and didn't say anything about it, but on Friday afternoon, he brought it downstairs and claimed he "found it" in the storage closet and that he must have written it when he was four, but when I reminded him that he couldn't write when he was four, he admitted that he had just written it and so when he is silent and contemplative, I will not assume that he is planning something malicious because I now have empirical evidence that belies this.