Ethan had an in-school suspension today, but the principal apparently did not feel it was serious enough to warrant keeping him in school during a field trip. I don’t know where they went, I just sign a blanket “I trust youse all” form at the beginning of the year and they take my kids wherever. Probably they send home salmon-coloured-notes that lie at the bottom of backpacks wadded up and soaked with dribbles of pineapple juice until they are unrecognizable little tidbits of parental neglect. And if I read those notes before they reached that state, I would know where my son went today. But that’s not the important part of the story. The important part is how, at the end of the day, on the car ride home, he was bubbling and telling me how he got to hold an Olympic torch and an Olympic medal today. He went to another school and they were showing the Olympic torch from the last Olympic games (?) and then there just happened to be a gold medalist there (he was fuzzy on the details) and they got to hold the medal. “And then they told us we that if we believed in it and worked hard, we could be anything we wanted to be, and I thought ‘I’m going to be SPIDERMAN!'”

I don’t know if he was joking or not. Honestly, as savvy and ridiculously intelligent as he is, he is an interesting bundle of notions taken about the world which he refuses to give up, plus created realities that he chooses so hard to believe in that it horribly wounds him if you try to inject facts into it. So I don’t worry about whether he was joking. Joking or not, the speech charmed me.