Does this happen to you?
You are driving along in your mini-van innocently enough, making turns, using your turn signal, stopping at red and sometimes yellow lights, and generally being a good citizen, when suddenly someone punches you in the arm and cries: “Punch buggy red (or blue, or yellow, or some other color)!”
This happens to me a lot.
What also happens: I am walking through a parking lot, staying close to the parked cars, staying out of the way of vehicles in transit, maybe even picking up a stray piece of trash to drop in the nearest trash can, when (you guessed it), someone punches me in the arm and cries “Punch buggy (you fill in the color)!”
And this happens to me because I am almost always with William. William is a pleasant fellow with dark brown hair and alarmingly pale blue eyes. He is nine and an outrageous three-quarters (nothing can be done about the aging thing; I’ve tried), and he has keen vision for spotting punch buggies. And punch buggies have, in recent years, enjoyed a makeover and, with it, renewed popularity so that they are (have you noticed?) ubiquitous. I have a bruised arm to prove it.
So today we’re driving down the road (in the Honda this time), and he sees an invisible punch buggy and the punch ensues. “Punch Buggy yellow! Save!” he cries, and I am trying to shift gears and not even bothering to look for the Volkswagon because I know he saw it and I really don’t know how I didn’t because yellow is such an obvious color.
“What is this ‘Save’ thing you are yelling?” I ask him.
“It means that I’ve saved this punch buggy so that I can get someone else with it.”
“So you can punch Everett later when you see him even though he wasn’t here to miss seeing the punch buggy?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says.
“That doesn’t seem fair,” I comment.
“That’s why I yell ‘save,'” he says.
“So you can save up however many punch buggies you see, and deliver them all at once?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says.
“So say you meet someone for the first time, and you’ve never even discussed punch buggies before. You can punch that person in the arm for every punch buggy you’ve seen and ‘saved’ in your entire life. You can punch that person twenty times– or more– if you want to.”
“No,” he says.
“Well, what then?” I ask him.
“You can save them, but it runs out after a while.”
“You mean the saved punch buggies run out?”
“Yes.”
It all makes perfect sense to him, and I don’t press the issue. Who am I to say? I rarely even see the punch buggies he sees, but I know they are there. It’s the kind of life you live when you are nine and three-quarters, maybe. A life of loose teeth and lost teeth and new teeth that magically emerge from one’s gums. A life of cool water and hot air and hours for swimming; of plastic light sabers and x-wing fighters molded from clay; a life of piano pieces that are just so difficult and then, without remembering how, become so easy that you play them all the time, without thinking about it. A life of baseballs coming at you and a bat that connects; of bases run and pop-flies caught; of colorful punch buggies stored in your mind, spent with a punch to an arm or dissolving, unnoticed, because that tree over there– do you see it?– would just be so fabulous to climb.
