You want fries with that?

Highlight of the new academic year at Rye High School -- on the first day back, there's a "New Student Barbecue."

(Of course, they're too young to serve a nice Chianti.)

Still, life . . .

First apricots of the year. Well, the first that I've bought, anyway.

I wish I could say they were plucked in the dewy dawn from my own orchard and displayed in a bowl I found years ago in a market in Mandalay, for which I bartered my battered pith helmet.

But the apricots came from Costco and the bowl came from Pier 1 imports.

Kids today . . .

Conversation in the car on the way to school. All three youths present. I'm explaining something I have to do for the day job.

"So you work for a bank?" Secundus asks.

"I used to work for a bank," I clarify. "Now I'm a consultant to a different bank. They hire me when they need something written, but I'm not an employee."

"So you're a hired gun."

"In a way. . ."

"Do you get a gun?"

"Of course not!" I grasp at a passing whimsy, trying to change the subject from firearms. "But I get a unicorn."

"You get a uniform?" Tertius pipes up from behind, suddenly excited.

"I said unicorn, not uniform."

"Oh," he says, clearly disappointed at the trade-off.

Amazing what you find when you Google yourself.

Well, not myself, but the name of some old friends.

Because I have ISBNs for my Compleat Works to date, I have an entry in the Library of Congress.

But I just found that I'm in the archive of the University of Glasgow.  And not for my mystery novels. For a few hallowed, halcyon weeks in 1978 after leaving university but before starting paid work, I was in an Edinburgh Fringe show called "Once Bitten," a reworking of a revue that some friends had written and we'd all performed at Exeter College, Oxford. It seems that Glasgow has an archived copy of the program, with all our names meticulously entered.

A couple of my one-liner contributions to the script were included, but any full-blown skits I'd written had been ruthlessly rejected during pre-production, and instead, I wrote the music and lyrics. Dressed as Dracula, I closed the show with the title song, performed as a love duet with my latest victim, played by the lovely Lucy Habakkuk, daughter of Sir John Habakkuk, who was then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. (Sir John, that is; not Lucy.)

"Some men like watching women disrobin'
But I'm turned on by haemoglobin . . ."

"We can both watch your skin growing creamier;
Your folks will think it's anaemia . . ."

Now, of course, the tables are turned: I'm the impoverished full-time writer with no regular income, while all those old friends are off being extremely highly paid medical practitioners. So who gets the last laugh, eh?

Beyond Agatha.

"You killed me!"
"Well, you killed me back!"

An overheard exchange that, I submit, has no meaning outside the world of video games.

O Tertius, I stand on guard for thee.

Back to school. And nice to uncover a plot of disinformation in my own household, as over dinner, I find out that Primus (8th grade) and Secundus (6th grade) have convinced their little brother Tertius (4th grade) that Canada is a state.

Well, at least he's stopped calling it "Canadia."

Roll over, Heifetz.

Camps and vacations over, the boys focus on a new school term, Tertius showing great enthusiasm for fourth grade. He reminds me that he's signed up to learn the violin.

"You know what I like best about the violin?" he asks.

The timbre? The repertoire? The consonance? "What?" I reply.

"It comes in different colors," he says.

The son also rises.

We go to see The Dark Knight Rises, which holds the boys' attention, despite its nearly three-hour length. On the way home, we note where we may have seen the actors in other projects. Secundus has Morgan Freeman in Dolphin Tale,  and they may remember Gary Oldman in the Harry Potter series.

"And you recognized the man who played Alfred the butler, Sir Michael Caine?"

Secundus, on a roll, reluctantly admits defeat.

"'You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!'" I prompt by quoting The Italian Job, in an enviable and flawless Caine impression perfected by merely every other Englishman on the planet.

"Oh, I thought you meant the other Sir Michael Caine," he answers.

Oh, that wacky second amendment.

Crossing the family room without my reading glasses, I stub my foot badly on an unexpected item in the middle of the floor. It's Tertius's discarded nerf rifle, orange plastic camouflaged against the light wood floor. I'm going to lose a quadrant of the nail on my big toe, which is bleeding.

Tertius inspects the damage.

"I hope you didn't get any blood on my gun," he comments scathingly.

Do I hear a meep?

Secundus and Tertius have been playing with the hose and with water balloons in the backyard. After a break indoors -- during which Secundus is suspiciously elusive -- Tertius is persuaded to step outside the backdoor and wait.

A card descends on a length of string from the upstairs bathroom window. On in is written "Look up."

(On the reverse, just in case, it reads "Look on back of card.")

Tertius looks up.

A water balloon drops on his head.

Nice to know that an education based on Chuck Jones cartoons hasn't been wasted.