Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my five-year-old son began making paper hearts. He had discovered how to make a perfectly balanced heart by carefully folding the paper first. There seems to be a metaphor here, but for what I’m not certain: maybe for love, maybe for the way my son approaches every task, perhaps for both of these things. Years later, as an adult, he will design and make models of water treatment plants, bridges, glass windows that are a full story high; he will marry a woman who sometimes wears a hardhat as she performs bridge inspections.
In 1989, at the age of five, he is making hearts. He uses up a package of oversized construction paper; he appropriates post-it notes, his father’s business cards, and his older sister’s loose leaf. He rummages in the drawer where I keep wrapping paper and cards from Christmases and birthdays and baby showers, and he begs for sheets from the yellow legal pads that I use for my lesson plans. I suggest in vain that he turn his attention to turkeys, pumpkins, horns of plenty.
When I was a kid, I was pretty much a geek. At nine I started to
stutter so badly that the school put me into a class for “special”
students and my parents sent me to a psychologist. The approach
favored by the psychologist was to withhold talking until I said
something. Since I didn’t want to stutter and didn’t want to talk to
him anyway, we mostly spent 50 minutes in silence.
We eat Mimi’s Sauce with just about everything. Now, I am fully aware that I said “we eat Mimi’s Sauce…”
Back in the days when evening television was interactive family entertainment, when Ed Sullivan and "College Bowl" were on, my family used to gather in the TV room. In our house, that was the bar. It had a Fleetwood television built into the wall, with the controls built in next to the silk-covered sofa on which my mother would always lie, on her back, her head propped up by four pillows.
What do you get for the man who has everything, wants nothing, but gets anything he does want for himself? No, it’s not a trick math question; it’s my real life, eternal conundrum.
