Life With Boys

Life with boys-ish … before there was life with boys there was life with the Beck family … I was thinking about one of our adventures earlier in this month when we were sitting in the opulence of the Fox Theater … once upon a time, I think I was in about second or third grade our school arranged a block of tickets to see the Ballet West presentation of the Nutcracker … this was a big event … we were dressed in our finest … matching dresses, tights, shoes that did not quite fit and our fancy faux fur winter coats (or maybe it was moon boots, anything is possible) … before the performance we stopped by the pet store to get crickets for the turtle … you see at the time we lived at least 45-minutes from the nearest pet store and it was even longer if the weather was messy (which was most of the time) … so here we are, it is December in Utah and we have our cricket balloon … we can’t leave them in the car because they will freeze and the whole side trip would have been fruitless … so into the mom purse the turtle feast went … and all was fine … until the semi-frozen crickets were resurrected, coming back to noisy life … during a lull in the music … people were looking around … trying to make sense of the noise that was clearly not part of the beloved Tchaikovsky melody … we did what we could to muffle the insect symphony with our coats … I wish I could tell you if the turtle ate well that night or not … all I can remember is that we never took crickets to the ballet again …