The Boy at 9

The Boy’s mom gets a hole in one with his birthday cake

This week was The Boy’s 9th birthday and everything that accompanies it.  He’s beginning to grow out of some kid rituals, and we’ve had to accommodate accordingly. He still wanted cupcakes brought to school, but he informed us that parents aren’t there when they’re passed around. Not long from now, he’ll probably be walking to school without us as well.

We’ve also tried to set our party expectations properly. We knew we again wanted to have something small, around 9-10 kids, but the past two years didn’t quite come off as expected. Experience has taught us that it is possible to get 10 girls to focus for an hour on fine-motor tasks, but with boys you can pretty much forget it. This time, my lovely wife and I tried to put ourselves in the minds of nine-year-old boys. I suggested we take everyone to a shooting range just across the river in New Jersey, with real guns and everything, but then I put myself in the minds of the parents of nine-year-old boys and thought better of it.* We started thinking about a laser tag party instead, and it turns out that a few of those laser tag/paintball/arcade places still exist, including one somewhere out in Queens. Still, though we didn’t need to worry about live ammunition, we nevertheless had to get the partygoers to and from a place we’ve never been to in a neighborhood we know nothing about.

Sadly, we abandoned the idea of the kids and guns altogether. My wife suggested, with the ease and excellence that always attends the obvious, that we just treat everyone to mini-golf at the pier close to our building, followed by pizza and cake at our apartment. Done and done.

It was the right choice. The afternoon was hot, the pier a busy runway for the sun, but the kids didn’t seem to care, or only pretended to care for the rich comedic potential. (We brought one of those fan/spray bottles that got passed around and used a lot.) I attempted to supervise with mixed but expected results. The kids are old enough to pretty much run themselves, and I only had to tell them every now and then to get off or out of something. Q was there, too, playing the course behind the bigger boys with her best friend (who happens to be the sister of The Boy’s best friend) and her best-friend’s younger brother. Everyone had fun easily, it seemed. As we made our way from the pier to our apartment, the boys were still free enough of self-consciousness to all link up in a line, arm over neck, a wave of noise and energy that never seemed capable of breaking.

My wife made a killer cake as always (see above). At first she wasn’t sure how to represent the golf theme, but after some Internet browsing and stumbling across a small tub of gel icing she was in business. It turned out remarkable in both look and taste:  a buttercreamed mini-golf hole that included a water hazard (gel icing), a crushed cookie sand trap, a windmill, a chocolate chip for a hole surrounded by gumball golf balls, and a flag that Q helped make from a lollipop stick and folded red foam.  The Boy called dibs on the windmill right away.

As their parents arrived, we sent kids away with a light-up foam stick** and a book.  Reactions to this party favor were telling. One kid asked if he could have two of everything before he heard what everything was. Another asked me what the goodie bag was long before we were giving them out, and his interest dissolved when he heard that reading was involved. The Boy’s best friend, however, said “Totally awesome!” when he saw the pile of books and “White Fang, yes! I wanted to read that!” when he was handed the one we had reserved for him alone. No need to wonder why they’re best friends.

Gifts usually reflect people’s perceptions of the recipient, and this year’s seemed pretty accurate. His friends mainly gave him gift cards for various bookstores or books outright, along with a few LEGO sets that The Boy clicked together in minutes instead of hours. (He’s a varsity-level brickman now.) We got him, among other things, a Swiss Army knife, because he can handle a thing capable of serious cutting and sawing (including oneself). His sister insisted on giving him a white bathrobe — totally her idea — which he loves to lounge in with a book after a bath.

He is no less a thing of wonder now than when he arrived early nine years ago, and perhaps even more so. Bits of him seemed set at the beginning — yearly photos from the beach show how he approaches the ocean from the same stance over the years, and his lean frame even now like a long shadow cast by his infant body — but much of him, of course, is still in the making. Thinkers are mediators and reveal themselves in being between. We take in the world, and it gets broken up and bits of it lodged in us and spun together and out again at new angles. The Boy has become a fascinating mediator in his own right, quick- and quirk-witted, expressive, drawn to the arcane and the encyclopedic.*** He cares about most things deeply, which can lead to disappointment (often in himself) but also to loyalty and value.  I have come to respect how he appreciates things.

At the end of his day, we went in to wish him good night, a wish no less genuine for being routine. He himself wasn’t ready to end the day just yet, and he slid over in his bed, patted the gap he just opened up, and said to his mom with an excellent mix of love and joke, “There’s always room for someone special.”  If she hadn’t wanted him to get some sleep, she would still be there now.

Happy birthday, son. We love you, and we’re proud of you.

_________________________
*The minds of other parents, in any event. And, okay, 9 armed 9 year-olds may very well be a questionable idea. The Boy and I will have to go on our own in a few years; I trust him with a gun.
**Resembling a golf club, sort of. Party favors are a terrible idea and a pain but apparently pretty much unavoidable.
***Just ask him about Minecraft, e.g.

Going back out

I went back to playing basketball last weekend. It was the first time I’d been on the court (at least with other players) since I had to have myself repaired about eight months ago. Conditions were perfect. The buildings just south of the World Trade Center site have the height and spacing necessary to cast a shadow through the morning to keep us and the court cool. My wrist with the screw in it was stiff, always will be. But it’s my off hand, and my game self, even at this state and age, forgot about it (and the rest of me) fairly quickly. I even made a few shots.

More important, nothing happened. I didn’t break a bone or, worse, blow out a knee. I came back home that morning only tired and anticipating the deep aches that would (and did) wake up with me the next day.

Why did I go back? I certainly didn’t have to. My brother, who played college basketball and who is a little over two years older (and many degrees more fit) than I, has given up playing entirely to avoid the possibility of hurt. And despite expensive procedures going well and four-plus months of occupational therapy, the fall I took last May shaved about 20 degrees off my left hand’s range of motion. The pair of scars along the top and bottom of this hand look like an em dash and a red squiggly spell-check flag respectively — two familiar ways of signalling interruption and error. I do need regular exercise, sure, but I can get it with a lot less risk. (I could, you know, just walk around and stuff.)

I’m up early these days, have been for a while now, working more on my writing and on getting my writing out. I don’t have to do this either. I could undoubtedly use the extra sleep, and I’m probably well past the point where I should have started a serious writing career, whatever that means. Why struggle with learning the contours of a new profession — particularly one in radical flux — and inevitably subject myself to rejection?  It’s not as if I’m answering some kind of calling. If anything, I’ve become less invested in big-T Truths and more attentive to local facts and the way those facts sound when you say them out loud to yourself. Besides, I’ve got a job (if not a career), a great family, years worth of unread books, and Netflix instant available on several devices. I couldn’t be much more comfortable than I am at the moment.

Why these things and why now? Not sure, really. I do like the feel of the ball in my hand and the chance to be good in the game, even knowing that I’m now moving away from my best days with the sport.  In part, I want to show Q and The Boy how a life can be well lived, which means demonstrating how parts of oneself always remain elusive and unmade, and how loving and being loved can be a route to finding and making oneself.  Perhaps it’s also because the Hudson looks the most blue when lit by the morning sun, and that blue and the quiet house let me listen for good thoughts before the world’s great noise turns my head. Or maybe it’s just that I’m where I’ve always been — where we all are, I suppose — lodged at the slim waist of an hourglass in the middle of what’s to fall and what’s piling up. It’s hard to know when the whole thing has last been flipped. Better to look at both ends of the glass if you want to see the most sand.

Going up

“… your kids.”

He’s talking to me, I realize.  I take out my earbuds and pause the podcast I’m listening to. He sets down his grocery bags — one paper, one brought to the store. He bought more than he thought he would. 

“I’ve seen your kids lately.”

“Yep,” I say as I wrap the cord around my phone, use the occasion to look instead at my hands. I don’t recognize the guy.

“They’re really growing up,” he says.

We stop at a floor; a woman exits with no coat despite the afternoon drizzle. The weather this spring has been a puzzle.

“Sure are.”

The doors close, and the geometry of the remaining riders shifts, as it always does, into a triangle. He leans back against the elevator wall. Three buttons lit, I’m not sure which one is his. I begin to wonder whether he lives on an odd or even floor.

“Mine are now 17 and 24.”  He looks older to me as he says this; I notice his hair more gray than anything else, his glasses round and gold-framed, probably from several trends ago.

“Just 7 and almost 9,” I hear myself say. I’m curious at the unnecessary precision.

He smiles.  Another stop; the only other person exits, probably on the way to a dog that wants a walk.  Everyone but us seems to have a dog. I still can’t place him, but it’s a big building, and we’ve been here a long time.

“I don’t want to think of those numbers quite yet,” I say.  It occurs to me that I say “quite” a lot. Quite a lot, in fact. I give myself a moment to make and enjoy the joke to myself.

His floor, an even one.  He steps out and reaches back with a bag, the paper one, to hold the doors.  I can hear the high pitch that goes off when something interrupts the safety beam.

“You think when they’re older, you’re not there. They’re on their own.  You think you’re missing out on things. But it’s just different.”

“There’s always something new to be there for,” I say, trying to help him build his thought.

He pulls the bag and goes.

“I wish I could trade you,” he says from down the hall, mainly to himself.

The doors close. I'm alone. My floor is next.

Q = 7, or as clever as clever

Our daughter, Q, had her 7th birthday last Sunday. My lovely wife has, as usual, been working for weeks on parts for Q’s party, the theme of which this year is designing for dolls. The whole idea can be described as Extremely Girly, but all of us like to make and to encourage the making of things, even if that means inviting 8 girls over to make their 18"* dolls pretty.

And how they did prettify those dolls. We’ve found a guest list of around 10 or so manageable in our apartment, so we set and hit that target this year, too. My wife knows the fabric stores just south of Canal Street well, and she came back from one of them with a roll of elastic that she cut and sewed into rings. To those she tied strips of colored tulle (also bought in bulk at the fabric store and disassembled) to make great doll tutus in a variety of colors. She also ordered doll-sized plain-white t-shirts for each girl to decorate during the party with fabric markers and an iron-on flower positioned as each girl liked. My wife had their feet covered as well. Q asked each girl ahead of time about her footwear-color preference and made a list with the results, which we then used to cut craft-foam soles for sandals. During the party, the girls chose ribbon to loop over their doll’s feet, which my wife then hot-glued together with the foam. The girls could then affix sequins and other shiny ornaments to the ribbon to complete the bespoke shoes. Even the parting goody bags were for the dolls — little wrapping-paper shopping bags containing a miniature composition notebook and a toothpick pencil, all handmade and clever. Overall, the craftwork was basically insane in its tediousness, but the results (pictured above and below) truly amazed.

Note: To grasp scale, the pencils are made from toothpicks

At this age, the parties tend to be drop-off, and we kept the girls busy.  The Boy, who expertly helped make the tiny pencils, fled the house early to a series of friends’ places, and he made me swear that No Girls Be Allowed In His Room.**  Q more or less floated to the door when the bell rang, and the just-arrived guest then accompanied her to the door at the next bell, building the greeting with each newcomer.  Once they had all come, dolls in the crooks of their elbows or fastened into little carriers with cutouts for their faces, the girls set to work decorating their shirts.  My wife set up a hot-glue station on the far side of the room, which the girls took turns visiting while they waited for me to iron flowers onto their doll shirts.  I kept the snacks and drinks fresh; Q did the same with the overall atmosphere.  After the girls had made shirts and sandals and dressed their dolls in the new tutus, we had them all sit and eat.  Originally we thought we’d order pizza (like nearly every kid party ever), but we offered the group a choice between that and dumplings, and it was no contest.  And, man, can 9 seven-year-old girls put away the dumplings.

Then it was cake time. My wife now has a well-earned reputation, inside our house and out, for great birthday cakes. This year she made a two-layer lemon number with sky-blue frosting and purple-sugar accents. The only decoration (besides Q’s name and the requisite wish piped at the bottom) was a tiny feathered gown and handbag hung on a miniature clothesline. I know my wife thought it fell short of her best efforts, but I thought it was, like her, elegant and beautiful.

We asked the moms to come back a little before the party’s end for a doll fashion show.*** Once the audience was in place, we lined the girls up in our apartment’s hallway and put on some music. They took turns looping through the living room, showing off the clothes they just made as the adults clapped. The girls themselves wore big smiles of fun and a little embarrassment, but most of them wanted to do it again. Q had a great time, and we hope that everyone else did, too.

A. A. Milne’s poem “The End” from his collection Now We Are Six goes:

When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

This poem is one of Q’s favorites, and mine too, but for different reasons. She likes the short, smart rhymes and the little story it tells that we can easily add on to as we walk to school or wonder about the bus.**** I like that, too, but also how Milne captures the way kids sometimes treat time as just another choice to be made while he himself participates in that choice. Milne calls the poem “The End” and hands it to his reader on the way out of the book, and in doing so gives the last line a type of truth, though Christopher Robin eventually left the nursery and the Hundred-Acre Wood and, ultimately, this earth. In a sense, then, Milne also wants his son to be six now for ever and ever. I understand the impulse.

That evening, after Q and The Boy had come down enough from the day to give in to the night, the house gets still. It’s been raining solid and hard all day, the storm knocking on all the windows at once, wanting in.  Quiet comes on, at first before it’s noticed, like a brush of breeze that stands out once the air goes calm. These are times when it’s hard to believe that quiet is like cold — an absence of something rather than a thing in itself. Outside, the Hudson River slows and smooths, then stops altogether, the ferries frozen at the tip of their wakes like brushstrokes. See a dog caught mid-bark just off the park, its owner in a swipe at his phone; the trees bent by the wind stay bent.  I can take this world and turn it, can find Q in every corner.  At her desk in her room in a book, then making lists with a pencil that needs sharpening.  Out front with her hands deep in the sand, looking to see if I’m looking at her.  On line for Italian ice from the man on Chambers Street who knows her well now, both of them wondering which flavor she wants this time.  Hanging upside down on a playground bar and showing someone how it’s done. Always everywhere there’s that face of hers, the one where she half-closes her eyes and half-smiles, meaning she’s seen through a joke or an attempt at a tease.

Q, asleep, exhaled.  The Hudson wrinkled itself back up, and the ferries aimed for their slips.  I thought I heard the dog finish its bark, but it was hard to tell over the rain.  

Happy birthday, Q.  Now you are seven, still as clever as clever.  We will love you forever and ever.

_________________________

*I’m deliberately being general here.  American Girl used to own the 18"-doll category pretty much outright — every girl but Q brought one of these to the party — but some compelling newcomers have recently moved in on AG’s territory.  Q (now) has two Journey Girls dolls, which do look slightly different than American Girls, only noticeably so when the two get put side-by-side and a person really looks.  Other differences exist too, but they trigger thorny questions about class and feelings of inadequacy that can extend into adulthood, so I’ll stop right about here.↩

**Sorry, son.  I tried.  (Sort of.)↩

***Yes, I know, very girly.  But remember, they were showing off what they had created.↩

****We’ve decided that it should now go:  “When I was six / I learned some tricks. / But now that I’m seven, I’m as clever as clever…”  Now you try.↩

Science!

My son participated in his third-grade Science Expo last week. Each third-grader was given a blank piece of cardboard and a stapled set of instructions. Students were to come up with their own questions, which they could answer by performing experiments, researching a topic, or giving a demonstration. They then would present their projects in a big poster session in the gym, where parents, teachers, and the other grades could walk through the rows of kids and ask about their work.

The Boy’s project came out of a short video I stumbled across in the usual Internet way of a guy out on his deck dropping magnets down a copper pipe. Like any good magician, he shows his audience the two pieces separately, and then performs the trick, exploding all expectations in the process. The magnet doesn’t stick to the pipe but instead tumbles softly down into his hand.  When it came time for The Boy to settle on his topic, he remembered the video right away and wanted to go looking for the explanation.

The short clip gave us a couple of leads — neodymium, eddy currents — so that’s where we started. The magnets were easy to get off the Internet, arriving in a couple of days in a clear plastic tube wrapped in warnings. The pipe was a lot less easy to come by, oddly enough. Lots of places in town would sell us a contractor’s standard ten-foot length, but we only wanted a foot or so. After much walking and asking around, we finally found a hardware supply in Chinatown with a manager who happily opened one of his own pipe-cutter packages to accommodate us.

Once outfitted, we went for replication. Would our own neodymium magnet float down our own copper tube? Check. Even having seen the video, The Boy and I found the result hypnotic, the pleasant clink of metal on metal, the lazy drift of the stack of magnets down into his waiting palm.

Explanations pair with questions, and The Boy compiled a list of them to answer in his presentation, including:

• Why doesn’t the magnet stick to the copper tube?
• Why does the magnet float down the tube?
• Does the tube have to be made of copper for the magnet to float?
• What is an eddy current?

The idea was that he would answer these questions on his poster, include a diagram picturing what’s going on that can’t be seen, and finish with a list of Fun Facts* about magnets.

We guided him a bit, but he did most of the heavy lifting research wise. Finding information for this kind of thing used to be difficult, but now the difficulty lies in sorting and understanding information. We googled magnet- and eddy-current-related phrases and turned up all sorts of videos and cryptic equations, along with pages of physics and industrial applications, and a few fairly simple explanations. The Boy took notes. We also actually went to our local library (nostalgia!) for age-appropriate books on magnets and magnet experiments, which proved to be a mother lode of Fun Facts.

You may very well be curious about answers to The Boy’s great questions, and though I don’t have my son’s showmanship, I’m happy to oblige with grade-appropriate answers. First off, copper is not ferritic, which means magnets aren’t attracted to it. But copper is an outstanding conductor, and that’s important here. A magnetic field moving through a conductor causes electric currents called eddy currents. All electric currents have their own magnetic fields.  So gravity pulling a strong magnet (in this case, four 1” x 1/8” neodymium stacked) down the conductor triggers eddy currents, which have their own magnetic fields that repel that falling magnet, just as the same poles of any two magnets repel. The eddy currents and their magnetic fields prove fairly weak (again, in this case), which means the magnet’s progress is only impeded and not arrested altogether.

Cool, right?

The Boy insisted (before we could) on writing the text of the poster himself, first translating his notes into an explanation on paper, and then typing everything up to be printed. We spent some serious time in font selection. My lovely wife helped him with the big center diagram, though it was his idea to have a foil-wrapped magnet popup in the center. He was proud of his work, and he had good right to be.

The day of the Expo, he carried his equipment and excitement to the gym himself. It opened to parents shortly after the morning bell rang, and my lovely wife and I flooded in with all the others to check everything out. We went by The Boy first, of course, and he was all set up and ready to perplex passersby with his “Magnet Mystery” (his poster’s title). He performed his demonstration for us just as he’d practiced — first asking what we thought would happen when he dropped the magnet down the copper tube, then asking for predictions about the same magnet going down a cardboard tube, then explaining all the forces at work that confounded those predictions. Q soon came by with a pack of her classmates (all grades visited throughout the day) to listen to her brother, and he enjoyed the audience. He was truly great.**

As were so many of the kids. We know lots of families now, and we took our time hearing The Boy’s friends tell us about mass and gravity, geysers, rainbows, penguins, great white sharks, milk carton turbines, and on and on. The girl set up right next to The Boy talked through a truly unsettling experiment on the effectiveness of soap v hand sanitizer, one that involved a UV flashlight that revealed the dirt on your hands right then and there. For my part, I managed to discomfit a kid with a nice display on color vision by asking her since different creatures have different color experience what she thought the real colors were.  “I dunno,” she said, looking up the aisle and anywhere else but at me.  Sometimes I wonder why I don’t end up eating all my meals alone.

Aristotle writes that all persons by nature desire to know.*** It can be an oppressive statement if you think about it — the need to explain nagging and persistent, like an itch. And there’s so much to be known. Spring bloomed suddenly, some afternoons have been pushing 70º already, and the early warmth and wet air have produced glorious morning fog.  Fog occurs when the ambient air reaches saturation, forming water droplets that reflect light, limiting visibility to at least 5/8 mile.  Copper: Chemical element name Cu; Atomic Number: 29; melting point: 1356.15K.  Celestial bodies lie in space like balls on a rubber sheet, curving space and time around them.  The body a machine, describable and flawed.  A second is equal to the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Consciousness is an instance of consciousness of. F = ma, except when it doesn’t.  The Boy is an isotope of my wife and I; the recipe for his making written in a billion proteins.  Q hums sweetly while brushing her teeth (though she’ll deny it) — this a fact like any other.

Anyhow, thanks to The Boy, at least one mystery is explained enough.

_________________________
*Nearly every third grader’s poster included Fun Facts, where “Fun” means something like Related But Random and Interesting.  The science teacher probably suggested including them as a way to fill white space, which, given that this is likely the first public opportunity these kids had to present a poster, must have seemed positively Antarctic to most of them.
**Dare I say he was magnetic? I do dare say so, at least in a footnote.
***The opening line of his Metaphysics, usually translated as all men desire to know, but he’s dead enough to be forgiven this oversight. Also, perhaps no one better encapsulated this desire than Aristotle himself.