Jack the Pack Rat — Ain't That a Kick in the Head

In another era, Jack would have fit right in with the popular Rat Pack.
Well, granted, I’m letting words out of the dictionary to play with themselves because of course I mean packrat. And there isn't anything the 5-year-old packrat won't try to squirrel away.
Jack the Rat (if he adopted a nickname like some other Italians have done over the years) latches onto anything that catches his fancy. And I assure you that everything catches his fancy — from worthless pieces of paper to some of my own prized toys he tries to finagle. (Ain't that a kick in the head?)

Surely I hyperbolize, you say? Jack can't be THAT much of a scrounger.
Consider this: The other day, he asked me to hold a gum wrapper for him.
"Why:" I said, intending to throw it away.
"Because I like the color," he replied, so I tucked it in my pocket because I know from experience that if I didn't, he'd ask for it four hours later, or the next day, and read me the riot act if I didn't have it.
I have seen him pick up plain old rocks and fancy ones; in fact, he stayed with me last night and took home a slug of rocks he pilfered from under my mulch. He also has stowed paperclips, big and small; pieces of wire, straight and tangled; sticks, gnarled and smooth; and on and on and on.
His fascination with saving things hardly stops there, though: When the family celebrated birthdays at a restaurant a couple of weeks back, he insisted — insisted, I tell ya — on taking his leftover ice cream home.
The other day, I was busy elsewhere in the house when he tired of eating his ice cream. Next thing I heard was a crash in the kitchen. I ran to see what caused the clatter and there he was, looking up sheepishly from the pool of melting ice cream as he said, "I was trying to put it in the freezer to save it, Papa Mike."
So I tossed in what little was left with the ice cream he had secreted in the freezer the previous week.
He insists on saving half-eaten sandwiches — sometimes even when all that is left is a pile of crusts – "to finish later." I learned the hard way to heed his wishes because the first time I polished off one of his sandwiches as an ABC lunch for ME, he asked me two hours later where it was — and pitched a fit when I had told him I had eaten it.
Jack doesn't mind biting the hand that feeds him, when the hand that fed him is the same hand that grabbed his sandwich later.
Of course, this food habit will pass before we know it, when he reaches the higher metabolism level at which he will eat everything on his plate and then some.
His 7-year-old brother Vincent already is there; I’m afraid his ears are going to fall off from having his head stuck in the refrigerator foraging for food so often.
Speaking of Vincent and foraging, time was, back when he and I used to run to the tracks to watch trains snake by, we also would walk along the right-of-way and pick up parts that had fallen off the trains (it’s amazing what we found, and I sure hope that many parts don’t fall off of planes). Eventually, I noticed the sign that said I was trespassing on private train property, so we never reached our goal of having enough train parts to make our own engine.
Vincent isn’t such a bone collector as I am, but I have a feeling that Jack’s tendency to save junk is just a hint of things to come. He’ll join me in the Dumpster Diver Hall of Fame in which I am ensconced for, for instance, retrieving a boom box 15 years ago that still plays today, cobbling together a workbench from salvaged wood, claiming as a workbench a really cool table that a store had tossed into the alley, snagging a little cabinet that looked ugly, with its red and black enamel paint job (behold, when I stripped it, I found a beautiful oak piece of furniture I have treasured for these three-plus decades).
I don’t think he’ll follow in my footsteps in not being able to eat food beyond its expiration date though. Just this morning, he turned up his nose at the cereal I proffered him, saying the milk “tasted funny.” Well, the milk HADN’T expired, and it didn’t taste funny to me.
But once he said that, it was like a runaway train, with brother Luke spurning the cereal, too.
I guess some packrats have standards.
But there’ll NEVER be another Rat Pack.

Something else you’ll never see again: All the guests on a TV talk show smoking butts (along with the host, Johnny Carson). George Gobel is a HOOT on this: