Dispatches from AJ’s: Chapter Two
I have a four-year-old brother. His name is Aiden Joseph, AJ for short. I returned home for Spring Break the first week of March, and to AJ’s delight, the world ended. Now we spend all day together.
For the next few months, I’ll be documenting the outlandish moments we share. There are many. Enjoy.
On Animal Crackers
On the floor of our pantry, my mother keeps a bottomless three-pound tub of Animal Crackers. AJ loves Animal Crackers. He has a bowl for breakfast if he’s the first in the house to wake. They sustain him in the event of a late lunch or dinner. When he gets the munchies before bed, he drags the tub onto our mother’s lap and crunches elephants and donkeys through a movie until his eyelids fall victim to a long day of play.
I don’t understand his obsession. Animal Crackers are unsatisfying lumps of sugar, flour, and corn syrup, inferior to the much more esteemed graham cracker or Nilla Wafer. I know this because I’ve tried hundreds, maybe thousands of Animals Crackers, in the last week, just to make sure. I shudder when AJ sets the tub next to our coloring spread or Lego castles or 24-piece puzzles, but out of respect to my host’s kind gesture, I limit myself to no more than eight or nine handfuls. No matter how quickly I try to empty and dispose of the tub, to remove it from my sight and my thoughts and my dreams, a new one appears, right there, magically, on the floor of the pantry.
God, I hate them with every ounce of my being.
You think P.T. Barnum’s popularization of the modern circus is a crime against the animal kingdom? Clearly you’ve never tried his cracker. Atrocious. Kids who torture cats grow into serial killers. We know that. But kids who sever Animal Cracker limbs become kids who torture cats, and by refusing to eradicate the problem at its root by discontinuing these glorified pieces of stale bread dough, senseless murder has claimed the lives of many. That’s why I devour the crackers whole, before ideas of homicide invade my mind, and I teach AJ to do the same.
Some of the animals come out deformed — pumas with three legs, horses with no hindquarters, elephants with amputated trunks. It’s only right for me to eliminate these insults to culinary design as quickly as possible. The tub itself — shaped like an enlarged gummy bear wearing a clueless, pathetic blank stare — is an insult to product design. When I grab a handful of crackers from its belly, the indent of the bear’s neck forces my hand to tighten and I drop one to four back into the jar, which infuriates me, so I throw the jar against the wall where the crackers spray out onto the floor, and I have five seconds to shove them into my mouth (we can’t waste food in times like these) before the germs find them.
Worse, some Animal Crackers come coated in pink and white frosting, a concoction so bad I must first remove it, with my tongue, from the cracker before I —
My Lifting Partner
To combat the excessive amounts of Animal Crackers I consume at home, I’ve taken to working out in the basement. My setup isn’t much — a yoga mat, a set of dumbells, a floor fan — but I already prefer it to public gyms, where young, fit, athletic men can’t keep their eyes off me.
As of late, AJ has tailed me every minute of every day. It’s flattering but equally exhausting, and sometimes I’d like to go to the bathroom without him sliding notes or mints or socks under the door. The first afternoon I vowed to work out, I slithered downstairs, put buds in my ears, and began to stretch, ready to focus on something other than his entertainment for an hour. It lasted approximately 150 seconds.
He barged in the door as I loosened my rusty hip flexors.
“What are you doing?” He asked.
“I’m about to work out,” I said, leaning back with my right leg tucked behind me.
“What’s that?”
“I move my body around and try to sweat a lot, like you do when you play Wii.”
“Can we play the Wii instead?”
“Please go upstairs.”
Five minutes later, he reappeared at the door, this time with my mother’s phone connected to a pair of blue over-the-ear headphones atop of his head. He plopped down at the head of the mat where I was doing Russian Twists. He set the phone at his side, balanced on his butt, began oscillating his folded hands from hip to hip. I stopped. He stopped. I started. He started. For the next twenty minutes, he mimicked my movements. I did push-ups, he did something close to the Downward Dog. I grabbed my set of 25-pound dumbbells, he grabbed a pair of purple three-pounders. I stood in front of the fan and gulped from my water bottle, he took my side and said, “Can I have that when you’re done?” What made this especially impressive: he sang the Frozen II soundtrack the entire time.
Soon, however, he grew tired and sat on the floor to play games on my mother’s phone while I finished working out.
“Austin!” he yelled, minutes later. I was doing dips on a cooler, which sounds ridiculous, and is.
“What’s up?” I said.
“WHAT YOU SAID?” he yelled louder. I tapped my ear.
“Oh,” he said, pulling a headphone behind his. “I’m bored.”
I stood up and checked the clock. He’d been down here with me for 45 minutes.
“Me too,” I said.
We peeled off our headphones, turned on the Wii, and inserted Super Mario Bros.; I sat on the floor and played games while he finished working out.
