My son is stick-handling a hockey ball on the hardwood floor in the family room, when I notice a skate wrench lying on the table.

I say, “Why don’t you put that skate wrench in your hockey bag?”

“Okay,” he says.

“Why don’t you do it now, while you’re thinking about it?”

“Okay,” he says.

A couple minutes later, when he’s still stick-handling and the wrench is still lying there, I say, “While you’re thinking about it, why don’t you put that skate wrench in your hockey bag?”

“Okay,” he says.

“That’s the third time you’ve said okay, and the wrench is still there.”

“I’m still thinking about it.”

We’ve got plenty of mirrors in the house, but for some reason, our son has come into our room to comb his hair in our mirror . . .

“What a handsome boy!” his mom says.

I say, “Like his pappy.”

“He’s got me in him too,” she says. “My dad was handsome. And my uncles are very handsome. You haven’t seen them.”

I can’t resist mentioning that her brother, who I have seen, is anything but handsome.

“I don’t know what happened to him,” she says.

Halloween memories . . .

In the process of rearranging things in the house last weekend, my wife found a box of pictures of me as a boy and showed them to our son.

“Dude, those were funny,” he says. “There’s one of you sitting on a motorcycle –” He makes an angry face and pantomimes driving a motorcycle. “Vroom! Vroom! And you’re wearing — ha, ha — you’re wearing a pair of –” Now he’s laughing so hard he can hardly talk, but he manages to spit out “– plaid pants!” before collapsing in a coughing, sputtering fit.

I explain to him that plaid pants were popular in the 1970s.

“Mom!” he yells downstairs. “Where’s that box of pictures of Dad?”

“Under the desk in the den,” she yells back.

“I’ve seen those pictures,” I say, “so if you’re planning to show them to me and laugh about it, you’re wasting your time.”

“I’ve just got to see them again myself . . .”

FATHER: Would you take out the trash please?

SON: Are you KIDDING?! I’m doing homework! I’ll take out the trash if you read To Kill a Mockingbird and tell me what each chapter is about.

FATHER: I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird. You want to know what it’s about? ‘Racism is Bad.’ Now take out the garbage.

SON: Mom said my dinner was going to be ready by now and she hasn’t even started cooking it yet.

FATHER: You’re a big boy. Why don’t you make something yourself?

SON: I’m really not happy with the service I’m receiving here.

SON: So was Mom pretty horny when you first met her?

FATHER: Oh Jesus . . .

My son’s looking forward to February when his braces come off . . .

“Throw some Crest whitening strips on there and the sky’s the limit as far as girlfriends are concerned,” he says.

“Girls are a distraction right now,” his mom says. “You need to focus on academics.”

“Mom’s right,” I say. “Having a wife or a girlfriend is like taking a 5-year-old to the mall. You can’t go as fast as you want to because the 5-year-old can’t keep up the pace. And you’re not going to be able to accomplish the things you want to accomplish . . .”

“Don’t give the boy a bad attitude,” she says.

“. . . because the 5-year-old is . . .”

“Whatever you’re going to say . . .”

“. . . monopolizing your attention . . .”

“. . . don’t say it.”

“. . . with her juvenile behavior.”

My son’s a percussionist in the Northwood High Wind Ensemble this year. It’s an advanced ensemble . . . he’s a sophomore and most of the kids in there are juniors and seniors.

They had auditions last week for section leader. I asked him leading up to the auditions if he’d been practicing his audition pieces because I never heard him practicing anything.

“I practice at school,” he said, “but my chances aren’t very good. There are some older kids who are better than me.”

This kid drives me nuts sometimes with his low-key approach to things.

My approach to an audition would have been very different. I would have practiced like a madman and showed up ready to kick some ass, because I’ve got zero self-confidence and I over-compensate in certain types of situations.

Anyway, the results are now in and the boy made section leader after all.

I guess you’ve got to let kids develop their own style . . .

My son asks how I’m voting on Proposition 8, so I tell him, “I’m not sure I really care that much one way or the other. The amazing thing to me is that same-sex couples actually want to get married. If I hadn’t been allowed to get married, I could have avoided a lot of problems.

“On the other hand, if we get rid of the ‘one man, one woman’ requirement, I’m planning to turn the house into a polygamy compound with Lucy Liu and Scarlett Johanssen as my new wives.

“Bad choices,” he says.

“Who would you pick?”

“Jessica Biel.”

“Okay, we’ll get her too.”

My wife comes home with a new Tommy Bahama shirt for me — 60 percent off — “but they didn’t have anything for kids,” she explains to our son, who’s now 15 years old.

“Ummm, I wear the same size as Dad,” he points out.

My son and I went to the Lakers game last night, a pre-season game against Utah . . .

Pre-game

As we were walking in, he pointed out an Asian girl with a spiky-haired Asian guy wearing an Olympics jersey and said, “That guy with the Olympic jersey pulled a hotter Asian woman than you.”

The girl was hotter than my wife is now, but not hotter than she was at that age.

“You don’t know anything,” I said. “Mom was pretty hot.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Game

Pretty good game! The starters played more than I thought they would.

Andrew Bynum is back. He looked good!

Jerry Buss was there. He looked terrible. Thirty minutes before the game, a guy rolled him out in a wheelchair to the end of the court. It took him several minutes to hobble from there to his courtside seat. My son said he had a leg injury. I thought he was just too old.

The girl sitting next to him — his date or his great-granddaughter, I’m not sure which — looked really good.

The Laker Girls totally set the bar for whatever you call these kinds of groups — cheerleaders? Dance teams?

I realized that what’s missing from my workplace is hot girls in extremely short skirts who jump around and cheer whenever something noteworthy happens.

We check in a bug fix? Gooooo team!

Then at halftime — or “lunch” as we call it — they’d change into tight pants and belly shirts and jump around in the new outfits all afternoon.

Good times!

Post-game

On the drive home, my wife called my son’s cell phone. The conversation was focused on exactly where we were and how long it would take us to get home.

“Why does she care about that?” I asked.

“She’s probably up to something and wants to make sure she stops doing it before we get there.”

I know a guy — let’s call him Goofus . . .

Goofus is dumb. I don’t mean that in a colloquial way. I don’t mean that he’s uneducated. I mean he clearly has a subnormal level of intelligence.

The most striking thing about him though is that he’s completely unaware of his own limitations. I’ve never heard him utter anything but platitudes and nonsense but in his mind, he’s the most interesting man in the world.

So many kids by the age of 12 or so have had their confidence in their own abilities extinguished by parents and teachers, that I really have to give Goofus’s parents a lot of credit.

I’m not kidding. They raised a supremely confident idiot.

My son just came downstairs for a visit . . .

“‘What’s due tomorrow?’” he says in his Dopey Dad voice.

Then back in his normal voice: “Math and Spanish. (Dopey Dad voice) ‘Are they done yet?’ (Normal voice) Spanish is done. I still have a little bit of math. (Dopey Dad voice) ‘Do you need me to check anything?’ (Normal voice) No.”

Now he’s waiting for a reaction from me, which he’s not going to get.

“I just did your job for you,” he says.

“Thanks!”

Roller hockey season is starting up again . . .

I don’t know why but I was thinking about one of the moms from last year’s team — she brought bottles of water to the tournaments, some filled with actual water for her kid, and some filled with vodka for herself.

To the untrained eye, they looked identical. I think she may have filled the vodka bottles to a little less than capacity so she could tell them apart. More than once I heard her saying, “Not that one, honey. That’s Mommy’s water.”

I took my son to the bookstore to buy To Kill a Mockingbird for his English class. They had two paperback editions available — one with a fancy binding for $15.95 and another one for three dollars less.

I pulled the cheaper one off the shelf and my son asked, “Why are we getting that one?”

I said, “Because it’s three dollars less for the same book.”

“I like the other cover better,” he said.

“Gimme three dollars.”

My son had an assignment this weekend to write an essay on cultural values vs. personal values in Huckleberry Finn.

The teacher didn’t assign the whole book, just handed out an excerpt in which Huck has to decide whether or not to send Jim, the escaped slave, back to Miss Watson.

So I read through the excerpt and sure enough, it includes multiple uses of what’s now known as “the N-word.”

I asked the boy, “Did Mr. Murano discuss with you guys about Mark Twain’s use of the word ‘nigger’?”

“No,” he said. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, our school is mostly Asian. Now if Mark Twain had overused the word ‘chink,’ then we’d have a problem.”

My wife loves to keep bags from the grocery store. Why does she love to keep bags from the grocery store? Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better if you haven’t been drinking tequila all afternoon like I have.

My son walks into the kitchen . . .

He says, “We’ve got enough bags here to open our own store.”

“Good idea!” I reply. “You know what we’re going to sell? All the crap laying around in your room.”

“For a second,” he says, “I thought you said ‘crack.’”

“Crack . . . hey, that’s a good idea too! Ordinarily, you want to buy crack, you’ve got to go hang out on a street corner in some undesirable location. We’ll bring upscale ambiance to the crack business. ‘Paper or plastic?’ Who would suspect you’re toting crack around in that Trader Joe’s bag?”

My son’s going into 10th grade and he’s started to go out in boy-girl groups . . .

“Whoever he has for a girlfriend,” my wife says, “has to have a good heart. Has to be very giving. Because he’s an only child so he’s used to it being all about him.”

“Do you think you have a good heart?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“You don’t think you’re a little bit too aggressively angry pretty much every day?”

“That’s not about heart.”

“What is it?”

“You don’t think you’re a little too annoying? Same thing.”

My son’s a mixed kid — white and Asian . . .

Last night, he said, “I should marry a black and Mexican girl. Our kids would be a mix of all races: white, Asian, Mexican and black. Those kids would be good at everything.”

Today is my son’s 15th birthday. He’s six feet tall, same as me. I actually have to look up at him a little bit . . . his eyes are higher than mine but I make up the difference with an improbably large forehead, so the tops of our heads are at the same height . . .

I tell my son, “If people see you as being arrogant or kind of an a-hole, it’s going to be hard for you to accomplish things that you want to accomplish in life.”

“How did you accomplish anything?” the boy replies.

“It was hard.”