Reading Light

He has turned into the kind of reader who steps off the bus with his nose still in a book.

"Oh, hi," he says with smiling eyes. We haven't seen each other for hours, and it's as if he's been waiting as long to exclaim, "We need a corn snake!" 

"A corn snake? Where did you get that idea?" 

He holds up the proof. "This is my favorite series about snakes," he says, his face masked again by a cover that glistens with reptilian scales. "Corn snakes are in the constrictor family," he says, wrapping his arm around mine, perhaps to keep himself from running into something.

When we're home for a while, I find him at the table with the comics, eating a snack without breaking eye contact with Garfield or Brewster Rocket. "Try this one," he insists, waiting for me to make it to the last frame before he asks, "Get it?" Then he pulls out a pad of paper to start sketching big-eyed cats and dogs after the style of Bad Kitty, pencil in one hand while the other turns the pages of his guide, one at a time. 

Later, I think he's asleep in his bed, but he yells, "Mom, are you incontinent?"

"Uh, no. What does that mean to you?" I reply.

Cackling, he exclaims, "That you wear diapers!" 

There was a time when I could kiss him goodnight after stories, and his heavy lids would close before I was out the door. Tonight, a little light shines from his room--it's way after bedtime--and something in Weird School is cracking him up. 

"Are you still reading?" I call back. It's not easy to turn down the laughter that comes from a boy and his book.