SAGE ADVICE: A fool and his birthday

My eldest son required that I deliver the present, a mostly rotted orange that had somehow escaped the Christmas box and had been ravaged by the frozen and unfrozen days between then and now, last night. In fact, the orange would now be more aptly named a dishwater gray, except that no one would ever want to quarter and savor a dishwater gray.
Nothing would suit him but that I made sure the birthday gift got to its destination before I settled in for the night. He was, to put it mildly, a little testy.
I told him I would, for real, deliver the gift tomorrow. He half-screamed, half-whined (wheamed?) that tomorrow would be everlastingly too late as the birthday present needs to be there on the birthday lest all the pieces of the universe fall in a heap like so many tiny pins. Well, he didn’t exactly put it that way but that was the gist.
The birthday, I should note, wasn’t his mother’s. That was, at the time, still three days away, a fact I think he knew, or might have known, or had heard something or other about. No, the birthday present, the mostly rotted orange now colored dishwater gray, was for Fool. The goat. The one we dressed up in a motley outfit back last Bland County Fair. The one that I’m pretty sure hates my guts, though I’m the one who feeds him, I’m the one who waters him, I’m the one who unsticks his head when he gets it good in stuck in the field fencing. Maybe hates my guts is too strong. He seems to like me enough as long as I’ll stand for his daily heckling and abuse. He is the kid in third grade who lies about having flown with his super spy mother to the Soviet Union over Easter break. (When I was in third grade, kids, the Soviet Union was still alive, kicking and pretty darn scary to us American elementary schoolers who were sure the cyborgs that lived there were any day going to rain nuclear bombs all over the schoolyard. Our only hope was that the crazed Russian cyborgs would do it before we’d done our homework. What a waste it would have been to have expended all that time and energy preparing for the following day when there wasn’t to be any such following day.) Then when you don’t believe him and say so, maybe even mentioning that you saw him and his alleged super spy mother at the Easter sunrise service at church, he gives you a semi-demeaning nickname that only he uses to refer to you, won’t let you play with his new pocketwatch arcade game thingy and tries to butt you with his head, right where the horns would be were he a goat, during recess. With that guy, and Fool, it’s sometimes not enough to know that you’re not the weirdo.
So there I was, walking through emerging blooms on thistle bushes, wading over saplings that had spent the winter achieving the perfect height to injure me in the most indelicate way, wishing for all the world my youngest wasn’t required to find every flashlight in the house, turn it on and wait for the batteries to die before hiding the evidence beneath things his parents would never think to look under.
I tossed the dishwater gray over the fence.
“Happy birthday, Fool.”
“Baaa?” he asked.
“Wasn’t my idea,” I said.
“Baaaa,” he said. “Baaa. Maaa.”
“Yeah, Friday.”
“Maaaa, maa, baaa.”
“I’ll tell her you said so.”
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