Christmas shopping with a seven-year-old--this is something I've never done before. I'm forty-one; I just kind of figured I'd never have kids, and I've never felt like I was someone who was all that good around kids. My ex and I never had kids by choice, mostly because we figured we'd both suck as parents.
But since I started dating Tabbatha, I've been spending almost as much time with Paul as I have with her. Yesterday, I needed to do some shopping, and so did he. It was my mission to take him to buy a present for his mom.
So we're wandering through a department store, and I ask Paul, as I have about a thousand times already, what he wants to get for her. This time he has an answer: "An ice cream scoop."
"An ice cream scoop?"
"Yeah. She really needs one. I heard her say that."
Okay. Seems weird, but hey, it's what he wants to get her. We head vaguely in the direction of Housewares (I'm guessing this is where one would find such things; like I would know.) when I ask him if he's sure about this. "No," he says. "She doesn't really want an ice cream scoop."
"What?"
"I was just joking with you."
"What do you mean joking? How is that funny?"
"It's funny because you thought she wanted an ice cream scoop."
Great. Suddenly I find myself in the middle of a conceptual comedy routine. "Okay, so what do you really want to get her?"
He told me, and we pick up a couple of things for her. I won't tell you what they are, of course, because that would ruin the surprise. And I get stuff as well, and as we're wheeling the cart to the checkout stand, shoppers wandering in all directions around us, Paul becomes weirdly fixated on watching an older woman walking towards us. She stops every few feet, fusses with something, looks at items at the ends of the aisles, shakes her head and moves on. Once she has passed us, Paul whispers, "I don't think she's a Jedi."
"Why do you say that?"
"She didn't seem to know what she was doing. A Jedi would know."
"Well, unless she sensed the presence of a Sith, and was trying to disguise her true identity."
"No."
"What do you mean, no? Are you an expert?"
"Yes."
It continued like that, a pattern of deadpan observations from him and slow-burn reactions from me, most of them laced with obscure Star Wars references. Anyone observing our conversation would assume I had known Paul for longer than four months, for seven years, maybe, and that this discussion had been going on the whole time.
