cat named pig

The other night we went to Fat Lorenzo’s for pizza. It was crowded, as always, in the tiny little entrance/waiting area/gelateria, but somehow we lucked into a few chairs. Elliot, however, had no use for the chairs as they interfered with his plans to run around like he was being chased by angry bees. After about thirty seconds of that — enough time to bump every single person in the area at least twice, and by “area” I could mean either the space we were in or a certain “area” of the anatomy and the sentence would be accurate either way — I pulled him onto my lap and whispered that I had a story for him.

He leaned in and miraculously held still while I made up the following cautionary tale, in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm but with a happy ending:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Elliot. He was at a restaurant with his family and he was acting very wild, running all over and bumping into people. And nobody liked that. Then the door opened and a man came in with a very large backpack. He scooped Elliot up and stuffed him into the backpack, then zipped it shut and took him far, far away. When he unzipped it again, Elliot looked around and said,

“Where are my mama and my daddy and my sister Siena? Please, take me back to them!”

The man said, “I will take you back to them, on one condition. You must not run around in the restaurant ever again. You must go back and sit nicely, and then you must eat your pizza nicely when it comes. Do you promise?”

Elliot promised to be good, so the man brought him back to his mama and daddy and sister, and they all ate a huge pizza and lived happily ever after.

Laugh as you may (yes, this is why I stick to non-fiction in my writing), Elliot loved this story and asked me to repeat it five more times before we were seated. Tonight at dinner, he asked me to tell it again. Siena laughed when she heard it and Matt, well, Matt probably thought it was dumb. (To which I would say, “Yeah? Dumb? It got him to sit still didn’t it? So is my story dumb, or is it dumb like a FOX?” Or something. I haven’t worked it out yet.)

And then. . . Elliot announced that he wanted to tell a story. The following is an approximation of what he told, minus a whole bunch of adorable and hilarious that doesn’t quite translate to the written paragraph:

One upon a time, there was a girl named NANA [this is what he calls Siena]. And she real bad and a big man came and put her in he backpack. And threw her in the GARBAGE. And Nana say, “Where mine mama and daddy and mine little brother EL-LI-OT?” And he taked her out of the garbage and she seed her mama and daddy and her brother El-li-ot and dey all eat pizza.

He totally needs to take over this blog. The GARBAGE twist puts my version of the story to shame.