Albatross.

I wouldn't have shown you such mercy.

That is why you failed.

Jacob would always pick up the flattest pumpkin he could find at the pumpkin patch and pretend to shot-put it at Ben.

He would yell Fore. As if they were on the golf course.

Ben hates golf. He thinks golf clubs are stupid and once took an old electric guitar out on a nine-hole course. He was marginally drunk that day and was asked to leave repeatedly. Jacob finally picked him up and dragged him to the truck and brought him home.

I instructed Ben to go crash in the guest room and told him not to emerge for at least fifteen hours at which point there would be aspirin, coffee, juice and dry toast for him. The guitar was left behind in the rough (where he threw it) and never recovered. Jacob ruptured a muscle in his back lifting two hundred pounds of unruly Ben with his arms and next time offered to first knock Ben out and then drag him out by the fauxhawk.

Ben never played golf again. So when the lawyers invited the boys to play golf yesterday it was a pretty easy refusal. We went to the pumpkin patch instead.

Ben doesn't generally like to touch the pumpkins until the knives come out to carve them. You would think he would take his bull-in-a-china-shop routine and extend it to a pumpkin patch but he's very solemn about it and he always wants to choose the exact right one. The perfect one. The Great Pumpkin. And so we'll wind up buying twelve or twenty-seven of them by the time Halloween arrives. There are already three on the verandah and a few handfuls of decorative tiny ones scattered around the house. Which I thought looked amazing. Add in another dozen outside and people will soon start thinking Bridget is selling pumpkins.

Great.

Or maybe not.

Ben is out back with Jacob's old golf clubs and the gates wide open to the ocean. He is teeing off with the mini pumpkins, watching them sail off the cliff into the sea. The ones that aren't exploding on contact, anyway. A good two hundred yards, I would wager. I think he's finally figured out the game.

Hopefully the guitars will stay indoors but with Ben I never say never.

Well, not anymore anyway.