Boy Going Places

Two images of Charlie from the past two nights.

We’re at the Journal Square PATH station in Jersey City with my parents. We get slowed down walking through the turnstiles. My mom and I look towards the up escalator and there’s Charlie’s going up up up, all by himself.

“Wait, we’d better hurry and get on”……………

Second image is from Saturday night. Charlie’s showered and lying in bed, and Jim and I are talking about what the mayor of New Orleans and Hurricane Gustav, how the Pittsburgh Pirates had their ninth loss in a row, what was said in a scene from the movie On the Waterfront involving the exchange of a coat.

Enter Charlie, stage left. He’s spent the summer wearing floppy outdoors-y shorts. I had heard some rustlings in the closet and Charlie appears in a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, looking very natty and, well, “dressed to kill.”

“Hey Charlie, you going somewhere tonight?” Jim and I ask; Charlie’s grinning in a self-satisfied kind of way. He pulls a soda out of the refrigerator and sits down, one leg crossed over the other, in a chair beside Jim’s desk and asks a couple times for “Chinese food” (what we just had for dinner).

This boy is going places.