{the hermit has left the building}

Barclay was on his way out the door Saturday morning when I derailed him.

"Can I come with you?"

He often spends time on Saturdays with a young guy named Noah. He takes him out for burgers and builds models with him and goes to his Tae Kwon Do tournaments and stuff. This particular morning, Barclay was off to watch him test for his black belt. I'd originally been planning on staying home to clean the bathroom but right now Tae Kwon Do seemed infinitely more interesting than toilets.

I don't know what the deal is lately, but I've been homebodying to the extreme, only leaving the house to go grocery shopping and starting to feel a little bit like I live on the top of a mountain instead of in the middle of a city. Suddenly, I needed to go to Tae Kwon Do. I needed to not stay home for one more single second. I needed to talk to someone who would, you know, respond. (My conversations with Sullivan are like, "Hey dude. I see you're looking at this cookie. You can't have it, because you don't have teeth. If you did have teeth, you still couldn't have it because it would rot them out of your skull and, besides, there's not really a lot of nutritional value in it anyway. I probably shouldn't be eating it either." Et cetera.)

He looked at his watch--he had to be there in fifteen minutes. I'd just rolled out of bed and you could tell, but I threw myself into hyperspeed, pulled on a hat and a pair of jeans, stuck Sully in his car seat, and we were off within five. 

(I was proud of that, but upon seeing it in writing I realized that rolling out of bed and leaving the house without brushing my hair might be indicative of me "getting old" and "letting myself go".)

When we got there (ONE MINUTE EARLY), I spotted the grand flaw in my plan pretty much right away. The room was quiet and large and echoey, the crowd small and serious and concentrated, and Sullivan was hungry and mad. And so it was that I spent half the morning in the janitor's closet between a carpet cleaner and a mop bucket, trying desperately to keep Sullivan from making a peep. I felt a little bit like a character in a mystery novel, hiding out from the bad guys after I'd stumbled by accident onto their secret hideout, trying to remain perfectly still and quiet in the broom closet while they discussed their evil plot in great detail. But when he finally fell asleep and I emerged, triumphant, I just felt like a straight-up superhero. With dry ice and theme music.

The other half of the morning, the half of the morning that I was not hiding in a closet, was pretty cool too though. The students were breaking boards and fancy kicking all over the place. 

At one point, the examiner said some pretty profound words to a guy who kept messing up and completely missing the board he was trying to break: "It's not about making mistakes. It's about getting it right."

Well, duh.

Anyway. Noah got his black belt and Barclay got to cheer him on and I got my morning out of the house, even if I did spend part of it in a janitor's closet and smell kind of lemony fresh afterwards. Win/win/mostly win.