Maybe not killed exactly; I don't think I was directly involved in his actual demise, but I did deliver his eulogy...
We had a snow day the other day, the bubs all home from school and it just happened to be on one of my regularly scheduled days off. The two youngest McMonkeys were vibrating with a strange amalgamated mixture of teen and tween jubilation.
My eldest son refused to venture into the nor'easter. He told me he was too old for snow...
Me too, kid. Me too...
We other three, we layered up like only northerners can, and packed sleds into our trusty, rusty Ford Explorer. A short jaunt later found us at a local park, still unplowed, but already inhabited by laughing children plummeting downhill, over snow covered bushes. Of course, my two adolescent cimeans ignored their moms inbred common sense and bypassed the sleigh path most traveled, that the other saner kids were enjoying, choosing instead a vertically plunging, picker infested cliff, interspersed with tangly trees and mounded clumps of snow covered grass...
I looked at it and had second thoughts.
Second, thirds and fourths, if we're being honest...
As they trudged up the hill, pulling on the frozen plants that would soon be whipping their gently iced faces, I stopped and tried to figure out just exactly what I was going to say to their mother later, when she asked what I was thinking.
With no ready answer, I sat on the bench a few hundred feet from where they would be sledding. I had no idea what I was thinking, I guess...
The Wonderful Wife would buy that.
None of the terrible things I pictured in my mind happened that could have, and the boys spent a rather uneventful few hours enjoying the snow. I smiled, now having an answer to the " What were you thinking?!?" quandary question I will eventually get for something else...
At home, everyone yanked off the winter clothes in the mud room and Stephen went inside to the kitchen. Jake and I finished hanging our clothes up to dry, and he said he couldn't wait for Santa to come...
I looked at my littlest McMonkey, at his trusting smiling face and deep into his joyful, childlike eyes and remembered all those times we played and pretended all manners of imaginated worlds. I recalled the blanket forts and nerf wars, superhero costumes and plastic swords; I somehow recalled each and every Christmas morning spanning the past fourteen years and the gleeful screaming, not even fully down the stairs,of all three in unison, "Santa came! He brought presents!"...
I remembered the nights of present-free trees and reindeer feed sprinkled outside in the snow, of expectation and extravagant wishing children's hopings....
Sneaking presents down creaky old stairs and praying none of the three slumbering kids would wake and venture out into the hall to catch us doing St. Nicks job..
We put so much effort into the illusion, into their childhood...
Where did it all go?
" Jake" I said, " You do know there isn't really a Santa Clause, don't you?"
Just like that.
Just like that...
I didn't know what to expect.
Jake just looked up at me and smiled, then in a tiny whisper he said " I know dad. I just like to still pretend, sometimes..."
I hugged him like I'd just been gently clutching all of those past Christmas memories; I felt his thick mop of hair against the pieces of snow still in my my beard, as I quietly mumbled ...
" Me too, kid...
Me too..."
