So I’m sitting on a bench outside my therapist’s house, because you don’t want to go in until the previous patient has come out, because if you did there’d be that awkward moment when you tried not to make eye contact, because if you did you’d both have to acknowledge the reason you’re there, and as American men of a certain age we’re nowhere near evolved enough to do that, when a woman and her, let’s say three-year-old-daughter walked by, and the little one looked me dead in the eye and with a very serious expression said, "My red scooter is broken." Now, because she has a three-year-old’s accent and I have 66-year-old ears, I didn’t quite get it the first time, so I asked her mom and received the above translation. I managed to eke out an “I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon” before she ambled out of earshot, which she acknowledged with an expression that appeared grateful and unaccountably reassured. She didn’t know me from Churchill, and yet seemed willing to believe I knew what the fuck I was talking about, as if I were sitting on that bench waiting for the rest of my five-star team from Red Scooter Service Pros to pick me up. The entire encounter lasted about 15 seconds, but made my day, as kids so often do on days I’m fortunate enough to chat with one. No adult would think of telling a stranger that their favorite toy, whatever it is, was broken. “Why would anyone but me want to know that?” is the question, if probed, the adult mind would arrive at, which is 180 degrees wrong. “Why wouldn’t they want to know?” is the right question, and the right answer is there is no reason anyone even vaguely interested in the human condition would not want to know. She wasn’t upset, she didn’t ask me to fix it, she didn’t dig in her heels so we could belabor and/or overanalyze her predicament, though I would have welcomed either. She just thought, given that we had never before laid eyes on each other, that I should know.
Rewind a couple months, and as I’m walking through the plaza in front of the Silver Spring Civic Center, dozens of eager ice skaters have lined the outside of the rink waiting for the Zamboni to finish its concentric rounds so they could get back to some awesome, 60-degree day-after-New-Year’s fun. Impossible to miss were these two little boys, who were watching the Zamboni like they simply could not believe something so wondrous existed, and were trying to get their little minds wrapped around what amazing feat of bravery and incrediblement the man driving it had fashioned in order to be afforded such a once-in-a-lifetime reward. Had he grabbed a school bus filled with safety patrol award-winners by the fender moments before it careened off a cliff, saving its passengers from certain, ironic death? Or was he, in fact, God, demonstrating what might be in store for those who live lives noble and just enough to sail through the gates of heaven, that they would be given an all-you-can-drive pass for a Zamboni that maybe could also fly if they so desired? Even jaded hockey fans like me understand that a Zamboni is a wonderfully weird contraption with a unique role in the sporting world, but after watching them watch it I was reacquainted with what truly dazzling machines they are. Their functionality is surpassed only by their watchability. As Charlie Brown once said: “There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire, and a Zamboni clearing the ice.”
Because the Rule of Three is a primary tenet of my personal ethos, here's one more. I went to watch Buffalo’s ill-fated NFL franchise in the first round of this year’s playoffs, and in the group was a guy I’d never met named Mike, and while he is a pleasant and interesting fellow, what I remember most was a story he told about his newly minted four-year-old son Niko who, during the celebration of his latest birthday offered, apparently without judgment or regret, the following: “I’ll never be three again.” I’m putting a Google alert on that kid.
These are but three of maybe a dozen kid-forward encounters I can recall from recent memory, and usually I can recall so little that clearly they resonate for me in a way many of my contacts with the adult world don’t. Age has drained me of the energy needed to cope with the subtlety of adult relationships; subtext wears my ass out. If you pay attention, kids can cause you to look at things with a decidedly more unvarnished perspective, to appreciate those things you have long taken for granted, and to behave in ways that are more appropriately silly than you almost ever can muster on your own. Kids can, of course, be exceptionally mean, especially when employing the twin towers of their punitive powers: 1) “You’re not my friend” and 2) “You can’t come to my birthday party.” But for most these pint-sized, ham-handed cruelties are just one small part of their ongoing effort to understand a world that all too often defies understanding. Most of the time, in the land of small children, things are what they appear to be, free of filters, inhibitions, and that annoying need to be socially acceptable. They play and play and play without games, and they make stuff up constantly without ever really pretending to be anything they aren’t. It’s the antithesis of the adult world.
There is one exception to my condition of being fascinated by folks who haven’t been here so terribly long. While children are generally my favorite class of people to talk to, I can’t muster the excitement and enthusiasm for newborns/infants that others can. I mean I get the miracle of birth and all, but they don’t do anything particularly interesting for months. Until their first smile, which I’m certain is occasioned by their first release of a truly satisfying fart—understandable, as they have yards of gastrointestinal material slammed into a space the size of a fanny pack, and although their digestive systems are weak and undeveloped, all grownups seem to want is for them to eat “solid” food like yesterday—they offer little but the improbable magic of their own existence. I watched both my kids being born so, not to be dismissive, but been there done that.
Most of what my wife and I know about children and parenting we learned from the teachers in the two-year pre-school class both our kids attended just across the street from our house. They taught us so many things it’s hard to isolate the most important, but if I had to pick one lesson it would be this: childhood is not merely preparation for adulthood, as so many of us treat it. It’s life—joyous, tragic, silly, and often scary. During my piddly one-hour-a-month service as a parent assistant, I was consistently struck by their ability to hear the music of 20 childhoods amid the mind-numbing noise of 20 children, especially at $11 an hour.
I have a friend who works for an outfit that works to save and improve the lives of hundreds of millions of children all over the world. If you’re old enough you may remember collecting pennies for it at Halloween with only a vague, sugar-clouded notion of why. In a very nice way because he’s a very nice man, he envies my ability to craft a graceful, witty sentence. I understand that the grass is always greener, but in a world in which the powerful neglect the puny simply because they don’t have any money, anyone who champions the cause of children should not only be wildly celebrated in this life, they should get to pilot that flying Zamboni in the next.
I agree wholeheartedly—up with kids, down with babies