With Dirt On It.

My mother is a painter. She doesn't do it a lot any more...every now and then she'll whip something out. But for years, she painted. She painted plaques and signs. She painted sweatshirts back in the 80's when everyone was wearing painted sweatshirts. Or was that just in Texarkana? Anyway.

She can paint a pie pumpkin like you wouldn't believe. The detail is painstaking. And then she shellacs it...you know, so the paint doesn't chip off. Oh, and then she hot glues a huge bow to the stem. They're ridiculously cute. She would send them with me to school for my teachers when I was growing up.

I go into all of that to say that somewhere in our house - and maybe Mom didn't paint it but bought it at a craft fair - there hung a plaque.

"A Boy is a Noise...With Dirt on It."

A. Men.

A noise. With dirt on it. That hits. And screams. And spits. And "kicks off" its shoes.

And chunks its pee-filled pull-up into the air, rather than dropping it in the trash. I'd settle for him shooting it like a free throw.

I started reading James Dobson's "Bringing Up Boys."

I stopped a few pages in. Right after he told several stories of "nice, respectable, grown men" who terrorized their neighborhoods and communities as children.

One story was of a kid who, with a friend (of course), decided to pour gasoline down a manhole. And then drop matches in it. The resulting explosion apparently wiped out an entire subdivision's population of porcelain bowls. Blew up every toilet within a few blocks.

Another was of a blind boy - YES, BLIND - who with another blind friend (because apparently back in the day they traveled in pairs) stole his older brother's dirt bike or motor scooter or other internal-combustion propelled two wheeler. Stole it. Then they road it. BLIND. I'll save the rest of the story for you. It's classic.

All of this is to say, it's inevitable. It's unstoppable. It's a boy.

And it's the best thing that ever happened to us.