Mother, interrupted

It's summer and Barnacle Boy is celebrating by watching awful movies, riding his bike to the pool with friends, rummaging through his fiction collection and generally just letting his mind go fallow (ok, rot, Futurama, really?). He's entitled, he had a great first year at high school (he got a perfect score on his final essay for English — tragic figures in Antigone and Romeo and Juliet — that would be his choice of topic).

He was sprawled in the chair in the sunroom yesterday watching something on Netflix. I looked over to see a distinguished guy in a toga stalk onto a Roman balcony and demand, "What is so important that you had to interupt my writing?" Where have I heard that line before? The gentleman was Pliny the Elder (note that in the picture he has a guard at the door, with a spear), and what was so important was the eruption of Vesuvius. The Boy (who visited Pompei this spring) was watching some docudrama about Pompei.

I'm not sure if the moral of this story is for my kids — don't interrupt your mother when she is writing unless a volcano is erupting down the block — or for me — don't assume when I'm interupted that there is NOT a volcano belching smoke somewhere.