I wanna lay on you daddy/Pop’s I’m running the shop today

Its Sunday and I am, Home today. Usually I would have been at my shop by now, for at least a good 3 hours. Now it is double figures in the morning – something I have not had a chance to wake up in since I started my store for dogs and my son returned back to school.

Little momma woke me up. She scatted out of her room on the other side of the house I can imagine and crawled in my bed. I asked if she was ready to eat and she shook her head in the negative and said, “I just wanna lay on you daddy.” I said ok. She arranged the covers and adjusted the pillows and assumed her spot under my arms laying her head on my shoulder, and as she always does, grabbed my arm and placed it around her. With my arm around her waist and my hand on her stomach, she gently rubbed her hands up and down my arms and whispered “love you so much poppa.” I smiled.

As we returned to slumber again, I received a phone call. It was from my son. “Hey man, where you at Jones?” I asked. He responded, “I’m at the shop pops, you stay at home to day, I’m gonna run the shop for us today. You don’t have to come down, Ill catch the train and ride the bike back home.

All I could do was smile. Nothing like a family business but still better than that, nothing like having the two best kids in the whole wide world. I don’t know what it is about them; maybe it’s the way they call me poppa, or just the way they laugh in their usual uncontrollable manner. I have tried in detail to remember when they have not been able to smile or laugh. I do know I see it when I take lil momma to her mom’s house and it crushes me. And I do know I see it when I tell little man he can’t do something or that he is doing something incorrectly. They so head strong and independent – wonder where they got that from.

They both love being at the shop. My son is the CFO on paper, and makes sales, cleans and counts the loot in the cash register each morning and every night at closing. Lil Momma, COO on paper, is always outside asking folks to “come into my daddy’s store” and passing out the shop’s postcards. She sometimes ask me to be quiet when I am telling folks about the products by saying “let me do it, let me show them.” I like, really love it all, especially when she pretends on her play phone to answer it and always with “Braincell.”

I tell ya folk, especially you men who may read this, gotta get you a number one son and a number one daughter, and even more so, start a family business. I mean, dang, best day I done had in a while, just hearing them two phrases: “I wanna lay on you daddy” and “Pop’s, I’m running the shop today.”

#1 son

I know I write a lot about fatherhood and what a great thing it is and how important being a father is to me. I also know that I talk a lot about lil momma. Namely because she is still new to me, being that she is going on three in June. But I want to say for the record that my son, well he is the shit too. He is likely the best son a person can have next to me LOL (love ya mom).

And I am not saying this because they won today in the last inning 6-5, making the Grady High School Knights 7-1 (1st place), nor because he is almost a “chip off the old block.” But because it is the truth. See although his mother has been in his life somewhat, I have raised him his entire life. When he was born, I commandeered a wheel chair and we rolled all around Crawford Long Hospital. He would be in my office at Emory in a walker, while his mother would be out clubbing, trying to find her girlfriend’s husbands. He has traveled to Africa with me on multiple occasions and was on his second passport by 8 years of age. He has been under my roof as well his entire life.

I am not saying this because I have coached him from age 4 to 14 in Little League baseball or AAU basketball at Ben Hill, the Fulton County League or Old national. But rather for the little things. Like the way he calls me Poppa, or the way he gets up on the weekend when I am tired and cooks breakfast for his sister.

And as I said, sure his mother has been in his life, and it used to hurt me like an Ice Pick in my right thigh (yes, i have been stabbed in my rt thigh with an ice pick) when he would say he didn’t want to go over to her house. Once I told him that if I ever heard him say that or anything negative about his mom again, I’d knock out his teeth. Sure he can be a knucklehead. Like this past semester when he brought home 3 A’s, 4 B’s and an F. Or like when he nailed this kid in the back of the head at school who swung on him. But Men aren’t we all at times?

I remember growing up Looking at Charlie Chan; he always had his number one son with him in the movies to help solve his cases. Biti (short for Thabiti which means a true man) is my number one son and my fist born. Yep, his name serves him well. He has seen it all with me, from cleaning guns to tracking wild turkey. When he was nine he said, “Poppa, when I’m 27 and old enough to have sex, I’m gonna carry condoms with me all the time.” I responded, “well little daddy, if u can’t wait until 27 just ask me for some. This past November, he did just that. “Poppa, can you bring me some condoms to school?” I said “Sure. You wanna do this, I mean are you ready, if it breaks to take care of a family as I do?”

I took him the condoms. He didn’t use them. When I asked what happened, he said, “she fessed…. But I wasn’t ready to take care of children like you do me and Chi.”

Like I said, nothing better than being a father and that it is the little things that mean the most, like when I came home sat from the shop, and he had mopped the kitchen floor. And all of this came to me while i was listening to Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture by Tchaikovsky (one of my favorites along with Ovarture of 1812 and Nutcracker).