SPRITES /// Paul Hundt

SPRITES

///Paul Hundt

This has been a tough two years. I have watched the election of a minority president, who with his venal cronies has launched unrelenting attacks on our political institutions and the Rule of Law. Long retired, I lack the refuge of a responsible job to distract me. In addition, the inevitable health and physical issues of advancing age restrict my chances to escape to the outdoors to hike, climb or fish. I have become a prisoner of the endless loops of TV news coverage bewailing our perilous situation. Thus, there have been few opportunities to forget about the deconstruction of the freedoms, norms and protections of the country I have lived in all my life and of my body as well. But one of those opportunities occurs each Wednesday afternoon at two o’clock. At that moment Puck, Ariel, Titania, and all the other sprites, fairies and magical people in Shakespeare’s lexicon dance through our front door in the personages of our two grandchildren, aged seven and eight. Denizens of two alternating caves about twenty minutes away, they flit into our staid, quiet household and turn everything topsy turvy. Like Prospero, my wife has loosed them from the confines of school, apartments and car seats and they rush to our front door to perform a weekly ritual: the senior sprite rings the bell insistently and the junior sprite hides; when I totter downstairs from my office computer and open the door, much is made of his absence. Did he run away at school? Did he find something to do elsewhere? Did the teacher keep him? Who is going to get his share of the afternoon snack? At which point he materializes from nowhere and they cross the threshold shouting, laughing, interrupting each other and me, claiming my attention with “important things” to tell me. As they cast off their coats, I am transformed into a line cook, waiter, busboy and dishwasher so they can fuel up on French toast or grilled cheese before the wild dance begins in earnest. However, before that starts they must dispatch one insignificant administrative matter that burdens their joy. The chief sprite, who as a baby would cry bloody murder whenever I approached, now insists I sit beside her, while she races through her English and Math homework at my wife’s desk upstairs. However, I am not permitted to look, help, or check. I just sit there. To pass this very short time, I color in an adult coloring book (inevitably going outside the lines) or I take my 2B pencil and draw the same desk lamp I have been trying to

capture for months. When her book slams shut, my time on the dunce stool begins. We immediately shift into a student-teacher relationship in which I become in her considered judgment an incorrigibly inept student, a Denny Dimwit, who deserves the lengthy punishment assignments that she inflicts, like writing “I will not (do whatever she says I did)” fifty times. Should I become truculent, or make light of the seriousness of my infraction, as I inevitably do, she sends me to the principal’s office where she, now the principal, threatens to suspend me and call my parents. I explain this will be a very hard thing to do since I have been an orphan these past fifteen years, a fact which elicits no sympathy from her whatsoever. Although I do not tell her, it’s very difficult for me to be in this situation. I was a very good boy in school, so good in fact that I never got a single demerit, something I am now embarrassed to admit and have been trying to make up for all my adult years. To find myself in the principal’s office for something other than an academic award is beyond my wildest dreams. It is a chance to make up for all the fun I missed when I was a kid. After spending a few moments in detention, which is mercifully much shorter than it would have been in real life because she has the attention span of tsetse fly, we play ZOMBIE; and it comes as no surprise I am to be the walking undead. She buries me again and again in a pile of pillows so I can stick out first a twisted claw and then rise from my feather covered grave with contorted face and limbs, making the appropriate horrible noises in the process. I resurrect myself again and again. On any given afternoon, I beat Jesus Christ handily. After all, he only had to do it once. Meanwhile, the junior sprite is down in the kitchen barging through his homework so he can pepper Prospero with questions: does she know that dinosaurs still exist? Does she know the wingspan of an eagle? After her unsatisfactory responses, he turns disgustedly to my birding manuals and copies out the names of all the hawks in North America. (Obviously we think our sprites are geniuses. As grandparents we are entitled to fantasize that our combination of genes has finally produced a couple of Einsteins. Let their parents face reality, just as we had to do when we were parents. The genius factor was not apparent in the intervening generation. The two Palookas we produced were so busy slugging it out whenever they got within three feet of each other, and stubbornly resisting all things intellectual and artistic that their genius remained under wraps. But such dogged resistance