Elijah

My son (whose blog-alias is Elijah) and my new daughter-in-law (whose blog-alias is going to be Marie) are blissfully far away on their honeymoon, unable to access computers to read blogs and such.
Therefore, I'm going to take this opportunity to tell a couple of funny stories about Elijah.

When he was a sophomore in high school, we all piled into the van on Sunday morning to make the fifteen-mile drive to church. He was in his socks, because he knew that surely there was a huge selection of his shoes under the back seat of the van where he was prone to leave them. As we neared the church parking lot, he began to search for shoes. He found one.

"Alright, who cleaned the van?"
"I did. Why?"
"What did you do with my other shoe? Is it up there?"
"Probably not. I carrying a whole pile into your room and dumped them into your closet."
"Mom!"
"Well!"
"Well I only have one shoe now to wear to church..."

So we all looked, but, sure enough. There was only one.
Elijah wasn't one to let something like that inhibit him, however. Boldly he walked into church and even sang in the choir. (Fortunately from the back row.)
After church we decided to go out for Pizza. Elijah limped a little as we walked into the restaurant and placed the socked foot carefully under the table. Whenever anyone asked him what happened to his foot, he smiled gingerly, and said,
"I think I misplaced something."
They commiserated; we all smiled.

A couple of years later Elijah dove over our backyard chain link fence to do a front flip and keep running--the way he always did. This time, however, he didn't jump quite high enough. The top of the fence left an impressive gash down the entire front of his stomach.
That fall at football practice, when he pulled off his shirt, the guys in the locker room caught sight of the lengthy scar.
"Wow! How did you get that one?"
Elijah didn't miss a beat.
"Fencing," he replied.