GOOD THINGS COME IN WACKY PACKAGES

  My son isn't furious with me right this minute, which is nice, but an awful lot of ducks had to be lined up to get us here.
  Earlier, he was seething with rage because I'd lost a valuable athlete trading card that he'd given me. I toyed with the idea of saying that I hadn't lost it, I'd just forgotten which enormously safe place I'd put it. Rejecting this gambit, I went into my office and checked the obvious spot where I would put a thing that was tiny and card-shaped, belying its immense worth. I looked at my Wacky Package collection.
  On top of the stack was a Willie Nelson trading card I'd forgotten about. I can't recall why my son had this, but he gave it to me a while back because while he wasn't clear as to who Willie was, he figured I might be. Now I was irritated at myself for putting the damn sports card some other place that I would never remember, instead of with the Wacky Packages.
  (Digression time-- these Wacky Packages were a big part of my childhood. After learning that Art Spiegelman had been one of the main creative guys behind the goofy parodies of consumer products, I realized that he'd led me to Mad Magazine, which in turn led me to Lenny Bruce, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, Robert Crumb, Jaroslav Hasek, etc. So I went to a Spiegelman book signing in the hope that I could thank him for setting me on a path toward Bohemianism. He was gracious in accepting this credit, and I kept our tête-à-tête mercifully brief.)
  I returned from my fruitless card search, and tried to avoid my son's gimlet eye.
I was drinking coffee when he asked, portentously, whether I'd found the card. The absurdity of this question caused me to do a spit-take, but in my unwise attempt to not spray the coffee out all over the place, a la Danny Thomas, I inhaled a lot of it into my lungs. The coughing fit that came next was a real crowd-pleaser, bringing the whole family together in a touching Christmasy way.
  In the atmosphere of good cheer that prevailed while I was inching my way back from death, my son let it slip that he couldn't believe I could lose such a valuable card, and he thought I had understood how valuable it was, since it contained a piece of fabric once touched by Willie Nelson.
"Wait a minute-- are you talking about the fucking Willie NELSON card? I know where that one is! If you'd just mentioned Willie Nelson, I could have found it in two seconds! Why didn't you SAY it was the Willie Nelson card?"

  It turns out he hadn't remembered Willie's name. It's hard to understand that, since everyone knows Willie's name is Willie, but I let it go. He knew it was "some music guy," but he thought maybe it was Randy Newman, rather than this long haired person who was kind of country, but not really REAL country.
  It's fortunate for me that I wasn't drinking coffee at this point. What do you mean, I started to say, but he had more. He had remembered the fellow on the card as "more of a rock guy, like Jim Henson."
  "The puppeteer?"
  "Not Henson. I mean Jim Morrison."
  "The Lizard King?"
  (I like to clarify these things.)

  Life is back to normal now, which means that when I drive him and his friends all over Creation later today, we won't have to pretend we still love each other. But the whole affair was food for thought.
  If this level of anger can be whipped up over a misunderstanding, and be caused by assumptions and lousy communication, doesn't this suggest that better communication and less assuming would be worth the effort? (As I type this, my son is doing his hyena impression while watching a Vine where the lyrics of Joan Jett's song are hilariously changed to "I Love Pizza Rolls.")