Manufacturing Life's Little Surprises

This morning Simon awoke to find himself in the middle of a giant spider web. His sister had stayed up late the night before, silently stringing a skein of brown yarn a hundred times across his bedroom while he slept, looping it through curtain rods and lamp shades, around door knobs, drawer handles, and chair legs, leaving just enough space for him to make his way to the door. She was motivated to do this by her discovery, while she was brushing her teeth, of a black-and-white composition notebook Simon and Menna had left in the bathroom. "SPY PRANK NOTEBOOK," it said on the cover. Inside was a checklist:

1. Ice cube trick
2. Things in water
3. Cold coffee with salt
4. Toilet paper trick
5. Alarm clock set to 4 am
6. String everywhere
7. Big Butt prank
8. Bathroom destroy
9. Tee Pee Josie's room
10. Toilet Squirt

When she showed it to us, we were mostly just relieved that the boxes next to numbers 3, 8, and 10 had not been checked off. Josie, however, was annoyed enough by numbers 5 and 9 to plot a series of revenge pranks, starting with the string.

Naturally Simon's first instinct upon awakening (once he'd clambered out of his tangled room) was to retaliate against Josie's act of retribution by taping a set of horizontal strings across her doorway while she slept. He then tucked himself into a makeshift hideout with a view of her bedroom door and settled in to wait for her to wake up and open it.  

After a while he enlisted my aid. "Can you make her get up?" he whispered to me, as I hauled another basket of laundry past his lair.

"Josie!" I called through the door, "the Bellevue Skate King opens at noon -- do you want to go over there today?"

"Yeah..." came her groggy reply. "But Mom, will you come in here a minute?"

Simon and I grimaced at each other: What now?!  I stammered something lame about being in the middle of something, and it might be a minute.... Simon crouched anxiously behind the banister. And then she came out! It was a satisfying moment.

Half an hour later the three of us were gathered in the kitchen. I had just finished putting indoor wheels on my skates, and was making a pot of coffee so I could fuel up before we headed for Bellevue.

"Simon, did you have breakfast?" Josie asked casually.

"Yeah, I had peanut butter toast," he said.

"Oh," she said, with a hint of dismay.

"Well, that was a while ago," I piped up from over by the sink, where I was loading last night's dinner plates into the dishwasher. "If we're really going to spend three hours skating, you'll need some more food before we go. Have a bowl of cereal or something."

"Okay," he agreed, reaching for the Life.  I'm not sure if it was the disappointment in Josie's voice, or the way I whipped around from the sink to watch him pick up the cereal box, but he suddenly froze with the Life poised over his bowl, eyes swiveling suspiciously from me to Josie.

I hadn't seen that look on anyone's face since the spring of 1990, when my friend Dave walked into McCabe library leading a group of prospective students and parents on a tour of our college campus. He had just enough time to register that there were rather more people than usual hanging out on the first floor of the library that morning... and that a significant number of them were friends of his... and that they all looked up just a little too quickly from the card catalog drawers they had been perusing so nonchalantly when he walked in, and Oh right, it was April First, before two bandana'd young men came tearing down the stairs, wrestled him to the floor, and carried him sideways right out the front door.

As Dave's cries grew fainter and the prospective parents gaped (the high schoolers were mostly delighted), another tour guide stepped forward out of the crowd and seamlessly completed the sentence Dave had faltered in the middle of: "-- over a million volumes, including the Peace Collection downstairs..." He was drowned out by thunderous applause before he got much further than that.

So there was Simon, sitting at the kitchen counter with Dave's look of dawning realization on his face, wondering what on earth was going to come pouring out of the Life box into his bowl. In that brief suspenseful moment we wished we'd had time to come up with something really spectacular -- a hundred hot-pink superballs, a swarm of dragonflies, a miniature fog-machine -- before the anti-climactic reality emerged.

Yes, it's true: Life is a bowl of... Cheerios.