Memorable moments come at unexpected times

As far as my 14-year-old son is concerned, my layoff didn’t represent the loss of a paycheck, the chance to get some really awesome birthday and Christmas gifts or the opportunity for vacations to exotic locales.
Nope, mom losing her job meant he didn’t have to spend unbearably boring hours in after-care waiting for 5:30 p.m. to roll around. Instead, he could be among the privileged majority whose moms picked them up as soon as school was over.
Now his mom could ACTUALLY be there to see him languish on the bench during the flag football games because he, unfortunately, inherited her athletic disabilities.
“I’m so sorry,” apologized the coach, seeing me hug my son after the game, and mistaking it as sympathy. “I got caught up in the excitement and forgot to put him in the game. I’m not the type of coach that cares about wins. I want everyone to have a good time.”
“It’s OK,” I assure him. “Ian’s just here for the exercise and to root his teammates on. It doesn’t really matter to him.”
And it doesn’t. He’s there for the camaraderie, something he’s been missing with his mom who spent way too many hours working.
My layoff was a chance for us to renew our relationship and discover that we didn’t simply love one another, we actually liked each other.
It should have been one of those days you just want to be done with as soon as possible. We had a big list of obligations and none of them spelled F-U-N.
We were up early to work the St. Stephen Catholic School concession stand for the i9 Sports teams, which means selling candy, hot dogs, water, Gatorade, coffee and chips to players and their parents for four hours on a Saturday morning. I brought the newspaper with me to read in between customers, and it happened to have the Macy’s ad supplement with the perfume samples inside. Ian and I decided to test them out, rubbing the samples on one another and then sniffing to see if they met our approval. I had just rubbed a Dolce & Gabana sample on the back of my jeans, leaned over and suggested he “smell my butt,” when, to my embarrassment, a gentleman walked up to purchase a cup of coffee.
Ian burst into a fit of hysterics. “Sorry,” he apologized to the stranger, explaining, “She always has me check her butt for odors as a precaution.”
We high-tailed it out of there as soon as the sports teams were finished to do some Christmas shopping.
“Turn this song up,” I told him as we drove along. “I love this song.”
The song was “Little Drummer Boy,” sung by Pat Boone. Ian turned the volume up to maximum, rolled down the windows, donned some my Jackie Onassis-style sunglasses and started singing along at the top of his lungs. I thought, what the heck, and joined him. People in the cars around us soon got into the spirit of the occasion and began singing along. Pretty soon there was a chorus of “Little Drummer Boy” and heads bobbing to “rum pum pum pum” along Bloomingdale Avenue.
As we continued driving to the store, he received a text message from a friend who ended the conversation with the familiar “LOL.” I confided in him that I used to think “LOL” stood for “Lots of love.” I was embarrassed when I later found out it meant “Laugh out loud.” When we arrived at the store, he had no qualms about revealing my secret to the cashier.
“Can you just see her sending a sympathy message to a friend? So sorry your dad died. LOL.” The cashier laughed so hard, she could barely ring us up.
Pulling into the driveway that evening after a long day of errands, Ian surprised me by saying, “Thanks, Mom. It was really a fun day.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “We didn’t do anything special.”
“Yeah, but we had fun anyway.”