Ned throws one leg over the raised railing of his crib, and turns to look at me. It's over, he seems to say, as I head to the living room. We both know it, and now I shall prove it!
It's over. I stare down at Ned, who's abruptly beside me in our living room. "Did you let Ned out of his crib?" I call to Jill in the kitchen.
"I didn't, no," she calls back.
Oh Christ.
A few nights later, or maybe it's mornings later -- who can remember on this little sleep? -- the last thing we know is that Ned is in his crib and the next thing we know he's trotting into the living room like the peacock who just took the blue ribbon. Not a trace of remorse, not one bead of sweat. Because he didn't sweat. Ned can almost climb down a playground ladder now, never mind up. Up is a cinch. Up he conquered, even on the wobbly chain ratline ladders, months ago.
Seems like last night it was Alex scrambling into the living room, proudly barging into our Blockbuster rental and/or dinner and making us brake our evening and cart him back to his bed. In fact, it was last night. Just once I'd like to eat my dinner and sputter at Blockbuster's lousy new movies in peace.
I recall getting little of that when Alex first broke out. He would raise one leg and let it hang over the railing while he slid and slipped to the floor. He fell at least once, I remember. Of course, now he's been in a bed for months, and for weeks he's been able to wrench open the balky knob of his bedroom door. (Balky knob. How lucky is that?) When we made the Big Bed Move for Alex, other parents assured us he'd soon get the message and just stay in there when put to bed. That message apparently hasn't arrived yet.
But now that he's back in school, Alex usually crashes first each evening. Half an hour or so later, I read to Ned and then let him sit with me a minute in the big chair. Then I say, "Ned, you know what time it is? End of another broadcast day ..." and carry him to the bed. If he puts up a fuss, I've always reached in and down, over the railing, and told him he had an exciting day today, he'll have an exciting day tomorrow, and it's time to go to sleep. If he's still fussing, I tell him he's so tired his knees are getting weak, and I reach behind him and gently knock his legs out from underneath him.
Why would he want to screw with this routine? But he does, and he seems to tease me about it. First time Ned threw a haunch over the railing right in front of me, he let it sit there a minute, strong and firm against the wood. What would you like, daddy? A triple-summersault to the floor, or just a lizard-like descent down the side of the changing table? What would you like, daddy? This railing has become a joke, daddy.
Dangerous too, I realize, so we're talking twin beds. Alex could use a bigger bed, anyway, as Ned spends half his pre-sleep playtime romping there. Ned is comfortable on a bed: A few weeks ago, Jill put him down for an afternoon nap (another nice routine that's evaporating) in Alex's bed. "Okay, goodnight!" Ned told her at about 1 in the afternoon. She supplied him with Red Bully Bear and Lamby and shut the door, and pretty soon to her ears drifted the sweet sounds of Ned crashing around. He can't open the balky knob yet, but she's pretty sure he never did get the nap.
He didn't get one yesterday, either, and last night he was up as a pup when Jill put him the crib and got herself ready to watch the Emmys. Ned watched her watch him as he jackknifed over the railing.
"Did you see how fast he did that!" she said to me.
What would you like, daddy?
It's positively easy for Ned, much as anything is ever "easy" for anyone. No doubt when we give him a bed, after a night or two of making it plain that he can get up anytime he wants but that he just doesn't want to, Ned will settle down. Even if he doesn't, it's not like he'll ever be able to open that balky doorknob. (October 2003)
Jill bought a copy of the first Toy Story movie a few months ago, and at Ned's insistence it's been run through our VCR often enough to turn the tape to butter. I bought the second movie in the Disney corporate store three weeks ago, while walls of Buzz Lightyears stared at me.
These movies are sad and joyous, good, balanced stories. I've always liked stories that make us more aware of the unseen worlds around us, and now I think about the world of the toys every time I pick up Ned's own Buzz Lightyear action figure, the one he keeps dropping until the legs snap off at the crotch.
"He's sad," Jill has often pointed out to Ned when Buzz realizes in the first movie that he's just a toy. Sad describes how we feel, over and over, at the song "When Somebody Loves You" in the segment where the Jesse doll gets dropped off for charity. "Maybe this time I'll actually watch it dry-eyed," Jill has often said. I don't think she's ever made it.
The first movie is about accepting your limitations and identity, the second about accepting mortality. The movies also contain many cool details, such as Woody and Jesse sliding from their owners' beds in the same way. In Woody's nightmare, all the playing cards are the Ace of Spades. The Eight Ball that's behind the dresser in the first movie, and used to lure Buzz out the window, has been banished in the second movie, with Woody and Wheezy, to the dreaded top shelf in Andy's room.
Jill and I and Ned all watched the other night as Stinky Pete the Prospector climbed back into his original box and pulled down the lid. "It's his coffin," I pronounced. Jill looked at me. "I love you because you notice things like that," she said.
We've traded comments about these movies until we refer to them with the intimate shorthand of "TS." For instance, "Sid represents the darker side of the movies' creators," Jill said once, further noting that this boy "villain" of the first movie uses tools to restructure and manipulate the toys the corporate world has fed him. In some ways, he's a more attractive character than Andy, and perhaps headed for a more distinguished future.
We're often humming, "You've Got a Friend in Me." "I like what they did with that song in the second movie," Jill added. She also enjoys Andy's bucket o' green army men ("They love what they do"), and to Bulls-eye, Woody's old horse.
"Bulls-eye reminds me of Gromit," I added the other night, over TS2. Gromit is the dog in the Oscar-winning British claymation stories Jill and I used to watch when we still had lives. "He's the only character to break the mirror," I said.
"What mirror?" Jill asked.
"The glass wall between the movie and the audience."
"Oh. That mirror. He never speaks, either, but he understands."
"Where's Ned?" I asked.
Jill and I are cooking up plots for TS3. She noticed, for instance, that Andy's mom refers to Woody as an "old family toy" at the yard sale in the second movie. Who owned him? "I also see a new toy being added," Jill said, "one that has been owned by somebody before." Hmm.
Don't we ever give Ned a book!? In the first place, TS has taught Ned a lot of useful words, like "infinity" and "beyond." But yes, we do still give Ned books: The graphic novel hardcover containing the stories of both movies, which I picked up Saturday from a street vendor for $5.
"Good job, dad!" Jill declared.
We have tried to trim Ned's TS watching, especially after a dinner guest watched him sit in front of the set for two hours and called him a "zombie." Last weekend, I introduced Ned to "Wallace and Gromit," three videos of a half-hour each. And so, the other night, at quarter to seven, not wanting to lock up our TV for two hours ("Star Trek: The Next Generation" comes on at 8!), I deflected Ned's demands for TS by suggesting W&G.
"Oh yeah," Ned said. "Watch Gromit, oh yeah ..."
Well, good, Ned. We'll put it in right after I check what else is on that shelf with Woody and the Eight Ball. (November 2003)
Ned will spend this morning in a pre-kindergarten class to see if they'll take him next September. This morning is important: There aren't many pre-K slots available in New York City.
So he and Jill get into a fight about getting dressed. "He doesn't want to put on his sweater!" Jill says. "I've got to take a shower."
We had a tough night of sleep. Lots of kids up at hours when they had no business being awake. "Does he want something to eat?" ask I, wholly unfamiliar with Ned's likes and dislikes on weekday mornings.
"He wants it if he sees you eating it. I have to take a shower."
"Ned," I call, "want some Alpha-bits?"
"Naaaaahhhhoo," he replies.
He's slated to try for acceptance in what looks like a good classroom: neat stacks of books and pillars of art supplies, clean bathrooms, no sandwich halves in the stairwells -- all the stuff Jill and I learned to look for in the months of searching for schools for Alex. This classroom also has a guinea pig and a turtle in the corner. Real ones, alive. Jill and I thought we'd have to search all over Manhattan and shell out thousands a semester to find this kind of classroom for Ned. The school is two blocks from our house. A guinea pig!
"Ned," I say carefully, as if getting ready to snip the last wire on the bomb, "you're going to school today. Real school today. Okay?"
"Okay," he says, and I slip him into the red sweater.
We take him by the hand in the watery early sunlight. The air has a slight snap, like a school day in late October. "Ned, you're going to school!" He has been watching Alex go to school for all of his life. He smiles.
The very large police guard at the school's front door seems charmed by Ned. We get the hall pass of softened, red construction paper, and climb the stairs to find his classroom. "Ned, we're going upstairs!"
We find his classroom. It is empty except for the teacher, a tall woman with long gray hair. "This is Ned?" she asks him. She tells us to guide him around the outside of the room until he feels more at home, then we can wait in the principal's office next door, where there's a couch and coffee. I take Ned by the hand -- actually, he takes me by the hand -- to investigate the guinea pig and a turtle in the corner. Real ones, alive. Ned tries to touch the guinea pig, who jerks. "Oh no, Ned, don't touch," I tell him, trying not to recall how he picked our cat up last night. "Just look. Isn't he pretty?"
"Pretty, yeah," says Ned.
We really want to get Ned in here. Suddenly our best first hope to do so takes Ned's other hand. It is a boy a head taller than Ned, slender, with dark hair and eyes. Someone tells me his name is Maverick.
Maverick shows Ned the blocks in the corner, where somebody's built a huge castle. Somebody else has built a 4-foot-high tower. Ned wants to help Maverick pull little blocks from the shelf -- though I'm not sure this is what Maverick is trying to do at all -- and Ned's tush comes brushes the 4-foot-high tower and makes my breath catch. We'd have considered him, Mr. and Mrs. what-was-it? Stimpson? But there was the block tower thing.
Maverick takes Ned by the hand. The principal takes Ned by the hand. I'm glad I taught Ned to shake hands. Jill and I head to the coffee and couch. I sit and eat apple cake some mom made. I eat three pieces while Jill is looking and one more when she isn't. I keep watching for the flash of Ned's red sweater past the door. It never appears.
"Ned is doing what he's supposed to do," one aide reports. "We go through this every day; he's doing fine," the principal says. Are they concerned that we're concerned, or do they know how much we want to get in here and notice how I'm being careful to stop Ned before he knocks over the turtle tank?
I peer into the hall, then duck back as Ned emerges from his classroom, apparently being given the tour by Maverick. "Don't let him see you!" was the advice when we visited Alex's programs. Ned doesn't seem too interested in seeing me, though: He's following Maverick, looking at kids' backpacks, maybe wondering why he doesn't have his own little locker. Point is, he has a chance to bolt, but instead follows the herd of kids as they zip up their backpacks, sling them into their little lockers, and head back into the classroom. Ned follows the herd.
I peer into the class. Ned wanders a little, then finally sits in the story-time circle next to Maverick. His head is turned away, but at least he's sitting in the circle, doing what he's supposed to do. Bet that guinea pig is thanking God for Maverick.
"Yes, Maverick is a nurturer," an aide says. "Thank him for me," I tell the aide. Wouldn't it be something if we got in here, with that apple cake? I'm grateful enough to Maverick to imagine his whole future: City councilman 24 years from now, mayor of New York a decade later. Half a century from now, the first Hispanic Vice-President of the United States. Who knows from there? To think Ned shook his hand. To think I taught Ned how to do that. (March 2004)
Is Ned the world's youngest hypochondriac? Let his words speak for themselves.
"My foot is broken," he said the other night, drawing the word out into "broo-kin." "My arm is broken. My hand is broken. My thumb is broken. Go to the doctor. Have to fix Ned."
"You have to go to the doctor, Ned?"
"Yeah," he sighed, much as he will probably sigh some 80 years from now. "Have to fix Ned. My hand is broo-kin."
"You said that, yes." Ned was lying down at the time. Absolutely nothing had happened to him in the past hour.
I guess as long as Ned thinks he's a hypochondriac, he is. He has his own Chap-stik, and one of his first phrases was, "Take me to my doctor." "Boo boo" is one of his favorite words. He has a collection of Band-Aids: sparkly ones, Sponge Bob ones, Pooh Band-Aids that come with a patch of red in the pattern and look like they're already bloody. Once I heard him honk like Felix Unger. He loves medicine, all medicine, and he treats it the way, well, Felix treats wine, savoring the bouquet of liquid Tylenol and the piquancy of kids' generic expectorant. The other morning we gave him a spoonful of a new Creamcicle-colored antibiotic for a rash on his foot. "Mmmmm, orange," he said.
"Medicine!" Ned declares at bedtime. "I need my medicine. My cough medicine." He coughs. My medicine?
All I'm used to with sickness in 3-year-olds is Alex, and with him hypochondria was one of the only things that wasn't a worry. Oxygen tanks running low, feeding pumps making him vomit, yes. Hypochondria, no. His problems were stakes to the heart, over and over again, and he never could, and still can't, tell us verbally when he's feeling bad.
Ned is under no such restriction as I pass him a crayon. "Ned, do you like to color with your right hand, or your left?" I touch the back of his left hand with the crayon. "Owwww!" he says.
He's standing in front of the TV during "Star Trek." "Ned, could you move, please, I can't see." I touch his shoulder to guide him to the side of the screen. He casts his hands high and flings himself to the hardwood of our living room like an NBA guard trying to draw a foul. "OOOph! Daddy don't shove me!" On his feet then, his finger in my direction. "Daddy don't shove me!"
"I didn't shove you, Ned."
"Don't shove me, daddy!"
"If I'd shoved you, you wouldn't be awake to tell me not to shove you." Trash-talking with a 3-year-old. I suppose I should be glad he didn't hold up his middle finger.
"I cut my finger. You have to be nice to fingers," he says.
Not that Ned lacks real health concerns. For months he's had a stubborn rash on his feet, and sometimes it blossoms behind his knees and in the crook of his arms. We've smeared it with over-the-counter creams ("I need my cream!") and, when that failed, took him to HIS skin doctor for a prescription of Creamcicle liquid. Soon as that was gone, the rash returned, and we got a new batch of creams that seem to be doing the trick. Still, it hurts to see him scratching.
"Does it itch, Ned?"
"Yeah," he says. This time it pulls at me. "Have to go to my doctor."
"Yeah, I know, Ned. We'll get it taken care of."
I'm holding him in the big chair, in the boys' bedroom. When both boys are awake I talk to them the same. But Alex is asleep beside us here in the dim light, and it's a moment to talk with Ned the way I wish I could talk with both my sons. "Did you have a good day today, Ned?"
He nods. "I have to go to my doctor," he says.
"You have to go to your doctor?"
"Yeah. Have to fix Ned."
If Ned's going to suffer from anything, it might the risk that I'll trivialize his need for Band-Aids, cough syrup, or attention. You do have to be nice to fingers. (March 2004)
Jill went into Target with Ned, which means she had to come out with something made of plastic that cost about a dollar. She and he chose a pale-green squirt gun, with a bright orange plug where you put in the water. Ned brought it home and started pointing it at people. "Phew phew!" he says, mimicking gunfire. I think once he mimicked the whine of a ricochet.
Jill doesn't have a problem with this. Never thought I'd be a squeamish parent when it came to a touchy subject like guns -- of all subjects, not guns -- but I don't like Ned pointing his gun at people.
And I grew up with guns. On the wall of the room where I slept as a child in Maine was a bolt-action shotgun, and a Winchester knock-off 30-30 ("the deer rifle"). They hung high on the wall, out of my reach, and it never occurred to me try to get them down any more than I'd plant my hand on top of the kitchen stove in January, or go down to the cellar and stick my foot in the furnace. My best friend's room when I was growing up was at the top of the narrow stairs in his house, and to get there I had to pass within inches of a single-shot breech-loading 10-gauge and a German sniper rifle his dad got after World War II. Somebody in my childhood also had a pump-gun, and my big brother had numerous .22's, and pistols. (So why'd he have to study karate so he could really protect himself from me?)
"My god," marvels Jill at this inventory. She grew up in New York City, where the populace usually doesn't run across shotguns outside of 7-11s or liquor stores.
Before age 12, I had treasured toy guns: a cool metal Luger; a plastic M-1 that I ruined with glossy green model paint; a plastic M-16 that was never the same after I broke it in half; a beloved wood and metal Kentucky cap rifle; a long silver cap gun revolver; and, at one point, a phaser made of old boards. I mimicked my own gunfire, ricochets a specialty. When I was 12, my cousins gave me a real gun: a muzzle-loading, .45-cal. percussion-cap pistol. It was the kind of weapon that a trained Napoleonic infantryman could load and fire three times in a minute; my average was three rounds in an hour. But Jesus did it fire, with a roar and a cloud of foul white black-powder smoke, shooting a bullet the size of a small thimble. I used to go into the woods and blow holes in army men, the six-inch-tall ones. Everything was bigger in those days.
My cousins thought guns were like hot stoves, too, and believed that kids wouldn't shoot themselves and others accidentally if they were taught by parents that real guns were to be left hanging on the wall except if adults were around. Period.
Guns, of course, have long been one of those subjects from which parents feel they must shield their kids. Another, and closely related, is violent television. I never believed that TV influences kids to act nuts until Ned spent about an hour rolling around as if shot after watching an especially violent "Star Trek." Ditto raucous westerns on AMC; we won't take him to the new Spiderman movie. We're not wild about him watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail, even though there were no guns in Arthurian England and even though he does endearingly call it "the bucket movie," because of the armored helmets.
"'Band of Brothers!'," Ned demands every Monday, at about a quarter to nine. "'Band of Brothers!'" I'm sure he likes this violent history of the 101st Airborne only because I've taken to the show, and after all it is history. It's also soldiers flying around, and being vociferous about why they don't like what's causing them to fly around. I watched World War II stories when I was pretty young -- my brother hogged the TV during "Rat Patrol" -- but for some reason I think that Ned's too young to watch war. Incidentally, I hope he stays that way long past draft age.
Guns aren't going away. Ned wants another one for the playground, a fat pistol you fill with soap and pull the trigger to make clouds of bubbles. I guess I'm more okay with this, except that Ned wants the bubble gun with the clown face on the front. That's scary. (June 2004)
Alex just finishes one or two of the sentences, especially in Tom and Pippo, and drops off in the dim light. Ned, however, has questions.
"What's that?" His fingertip taps the thick page of the board book Drummer Hoff, which is a lyrical tale about seven soldiers assembling and firing off an old-style cannon.
"That's Captain Bammer's sword, Ned."
"What's that?"
"That's the ornament on the tip of the scabbard of Captain Bammer's sword, Ned."
"What's that?"
"That's Major Scott's cannonball, Ned."
"What's he doing?" Actually it comes out Was'he do-ing?
"He's putting the cannonball in the barrel so they can fire off the cannon."
A tiny nod. It's rare to get through a book without Ned asking a question. The more tired he is, the more questions he asks. It seems to be more than just a delaying tactic to avoid being put to bed.
"That's Major Scott's hat, Ned ... That's a decoration on Major Scott's hat, Ned ..."
Ned usually asks about Drummer Hoff's drum, Private Parriage's carriage, the chain that lowers Corporal Farrell's barrel, and the keg that Sergeant Chowder hauls his powder around in. Ned has never asked about Sergeant Chowder's wooden leg. That's interesting.
Sometimes I get exasperated with his questions: "Ned, we're reading here." But I don't like to react like that. I think it's a good idea for Ned to read with questions, especially in a world that's going to spend the next several decades trying to get him to open his wallet.
Sometimes he strays into statements. He follows right along with General Border's order to "Fire!," for instance, and he relishes the ka-bla-bloom when Drummer Hoff fires it off. Last night, a British children's book on grocery shopping also prompted him to declare which of the drawings were of cans of soup, and which of beans. I explained that I wasn't sure myself, because this drawing was of a grocery store in another country, where things are slightly-
"Have to get a Sponge Bob camera!" Ned said.
I begged his pardon.
"Have to get a Sponge Bob camera for me, and a Sponge Bob camera for Alex!" He tapped his chest with significance, and then did the same for an unconscious Alex. "Have to get a Sponge Bob camera for me, and one for Alex, 'cause I want one, okay?"
Then there was the porridge moment from The Three Bears, when Ned noticed that Momma Bear was hesitating to eat her porridge after returning from her walk. "She's scared of the fly," Ned said.
Sure enough, there on the page, near Momma's bowl, was a fly.
"Well, could be, Ned. She-"
"Like you can't watch 'Sponge Bob.'"
"Why can't you watch 'Sponge Bob,' Ned?"
"'cause there's a bee in it, and it's scary," Ned said. "They shouldn't put that in that movie."
Sometimes I feel that when he's on my lap before bed, Ned is parading the thoughts and jetsam of his day, which he has spent away from me and about which I know diminishing amounts. Other times talking to Ned is simply like trying to make sense out of a tourist from some part of the old Soviet Union.
"Wha's his name?"
That's a big thing with Ned. "You like to know people's names, don't you, Ned?"
He nods. Then I get the idea to shake his little world. "Wha'she do-ing?" I say, mimicking him. "Wha's his name?"
Ned erupts in giggles. The more I ask the questions over and over, just like he does, the more he laughs and laughs, and demands, "Again!" I begin to wonder if Ned is going to become some kind of actor, or politician. Neither is cheap, from my perspective.
Every book anyone's ever going to read can inspire some question. Glasses for D.W. in the Arthur series, for instance: "Is that trash?" "Is that a dog?" Astounding that on many days all my thoughts come down to answers to questions like these. That's the fish's bowl, Ned ... That's the Cat in the Hat upside down, Ned ... That's ... that's a long story, Ned ... Some books inspire more questions than others, and some inspire tough questions. Ned always asks, for instance, what kind of animal the yellow goat thing is in Dr. Seuss's The Foot Book. I never know what to tell him.
Other books inspire questions at precisely the same point. "Where's Max?" he asks every time at the centerfold of Where the Wild Things Are. There are no words at the centerfold. He points to the claws on the foot of Max's wolf suit. "What are those?" At the end of Drummer Hoff, when the cannon has long since ka-bla-bloomed and the flowers and birds have taken over, and the soldiers are gone, Ned asks, "Where'd they go?"
"I don't know, Ned. They all went away." Time for mommy to come sing him to sleep. (August 2004)
A day of three Cape Cod beaches was winding down, and Jill agreed with me that the perfect capper would be a root beer float. Even now, a few days after Labor Day (Season of the Cheap Vacationers and the Roomier Route 6), there were ice cream stands open.
We also chose to forgo our usual dinner of chowder or fried fish for pizza from some corporate joint in the little town of Orleans. So far so good. But as Route 6 sped under our tires, Ned began to have one of his nights. He began with pleas for ice cream for dinner. Over and over and over. "No, Ned, we're having pizza..."
NOOOOOOOOO!
By the time we pulled into the pizza joint, Ned's idea of behaving had become to wait at least two and a half minutes between demands. Part of the burden on Ned to behave stems from, unfairly I realize, his parents' need to settle Alex into a booth or table in a restaurant. Alex has always been liable to bolt. Tonight, maybe showing prescience to what was coming, Alex seemed content to study the placemat and occasionally and quietly ask for crackers. We'd hoped he's eat pizza, but so far he eats in only one pizza place, on 96th Street in Manhattan. And besides, he was right there a moment before when we'd hit a grocery store for $1.99 boxes of Cheese Nips.
"Not yet, Alex. Wait until our pizza comes."
Jill goes to the ladies room. With even more urgency, Ned bolts for the claw toy machine in the back of the restaurant and presses his nose to the glass, eying the stuffed and useless toys inside. I sprint after him. I try to take his hand. "Ned, we have to wait for-"
"I want to see the toys," he replies.
I glance over my shoulder and see Alex still sitting over the placemat, so I figure fair enough, and give Ned a moment with his toys-in-glass. Then another moment.
"Ned, let's go get our pizza."
"I want to buy a toy," he replies.
"Maybe later, Ned. Let's go get our pizza now."
"I want to buy a toy!"
I haul him away. He breaks loose and returns to the machine. I glance back at Alex, who seems to be getting antsy. Again I haul Ned back. Jill has returned, so I leave Ned with her and go get our pizza and salad.
Immediately Ned wants to eat Alex's crackers when there's pizza. Can't blame him, I guess: It's got to be hard for anyone to understand why his brother always seems to be dining on something different. But I can blame Ned when he keeps bolting up to look at the claw machine.
"I just want to buy a toy!"
"Ned, behave or we'll take you to the car."
Quicker than it takes for a parking lot to get dark, I'm looking at my wife and younger son out there on the blackening asphalt, pale through the black glass of the pizza joint. I see Jill's face leaning in on Ned; I see her mouth working. Alex munches crackers. I see Jill point. I see Ned drop to his knees and hang from her hand - the boys' ultimate pose of protest. I see Jill and Ned disappear deeper into the black lot, then in the night the interior light of our car explodes to reveal her strapping him into the car seat.
Jill returns to the restaurant and grabs a slice of pepperoni. "Ned d is eating his in the car," she announces.
I eat two slices and half the salad, and offer Alex pizza, which he turns down. Except for the crunch of Alex eating crackers, I eat in silence.
Jill brings Ned back in. He sits quietly and picks all the pepperoni off one slice. We're a postcard of a happy if silent vacationing family for a few moments until Ned whispers, "I want to see the toys."
"Ned-"
"I just want to buy the toys!"
By the time we're back on Route 6, we're a postcard of a happy and excruciatingly silent vacationing family: Alex sated with crackers, Ned figuring it's best to say little right now, and me still yearning for a root beer float. Jill is thinking. Every now and then, though, from the shadows of the back seat: "Ice cream?" It isn't Alex who's asking. I watch the lines on the road.
"How are we going to handle the ice cream?" I finally ask.
"Ned, no ice cream," Jill says. "You were not a good boy back there, and I told you if you weren't a good boy you wouldn't get ice cream." Then Jill slips into her adult-to-adult voice and turns to me. "You can't back down on this," she says. "If we're not careful, we might be raising a not-so-nice person here. Hard as it is to enforce, I think it's harder still not to enforce it."
Sure glad Jill makes these decisions. Like maybe uncounted fathers going back to when protozoan youngsters threw fits in pools of ooze, I agree 100 percent with my wife and I will support her to the end. But I'm glad she made this decision.
"Ice cream?"
Moments later, Alex is using a spoon on his vanilla cone in the cool glow of the ice cream stand. I see Ned in the shadows of the back seat, his eyes slitted and glistening, his mouth a writhing "O". I can't hear him through the car glass: I'm watching the silent movie of his night of anguish. Jill is reading. I never get my root beer float. Out of sympathy, I guess.
We drive home amid diminishing sniffles. Before bed, Ned cheerfully eats yogurt with Jill. (October 2004)
I was in the front row, beside Jill and her family. Ned was about three rows back, with his cousins. Ned was three then, and his grandmother's funeral was by far the most solemn thing he'd ever attended. I kept one ear on the rabbi and the other alert for the kiddie chatter that would mean I'd have to rise at a bad moment and silently remove Ned from the room. Throughout the ceremony, that sound never came.
On the limo ride to the cemetery, Ned sat and watched gray Long Island slide by and kept himself quiet and busy while we adults talked about the stuff adults talk about during funerals. Then we were all at graveside, bunched in a chilly rain beneath the battered umbrellas provided by the limo drivers. Here, I thought, here he will give out and behave like a normal toddler doing something slow-paced and unfamiliar in uncomfortable surroundings. Instead, Ned stood quiet and appreciated the moment, somehow seeming, as I watched his back, to understand what was going on and to whom we were all saying good-bye. He reminded me of John Kennedy Jr. saluting the casket. I began to get a sense of the kind of person Ned would become.
That was the funeral, two months ago. This morning was the kindergarten.
Ned was to spend this morning at a local school with a killer arts and music program, with motivated students and a kindergarten lauded seemingly by every parent who'd ever walked past the building. Ned was turned down last year, after a classroom tryout by a teacher who advised at the time that we should maybe bring him back in about a year. In that year, Ned spent a lot of time, and a lot of our and his late grandma's money, on various one- or two-day-a-week classes around Manhattan. Ned loves school, and loves other kids. He loves being part of a group so much that sometimes I think it's best he wasn't born in Germany around 1918.
So we did bring him back in a year, for another morning's tryout. Jill calls about 9:30. "We're getting out of here!" she says to me.
I wasn't there, but Jill says she and Ned arrived about 8:30, the time of the appointment. Jill says the office was empty, but the kindergarten teacher was in her classroom with two teachers and no kids. The teacher asked Jill to wait in the office. Jill claims she was told 20 minutes later (while Ned thumbed the six-month-old Weekly Reader, I guess) that the teacher was having an "emergency meeting" and that Ned would come into her classroom at 9:15. "We go to the library to find a book to read," reads Jill's notes.
"9:15" I peek in and the aide tells me he is fine. They are writing, and Ned is drawing at a table with two or three other children. He seems OK.
"9:30: Ned comes in and tells me he wants to leave." The teacher reportedly says Jill may need to sit in there for a while. "We go back in the classroom and I sit where Ned had been sitting. She asks me to sit somewhere else. She tells me I don't need to 'be on top of him.' Ned continued to want to sit near me and with me. Finally when we give up. I get Ned's coat."
As they were getting ready to go, the teacher reportedly appears, and Jill says Ned just seemed very unhappy. The teacher reportedly replies, "Then this may not be the right place for him."
Tonight we call Rick, a different teacher who worked with Ned and Alex during their time in Early Intervention. He confirms that the teacher's comment was at best unprofessional, at worst reflective of actions that could mar Ned for his experiences at other kindergarten tryouts. I don't know. I think any kid who stood in the rain and watched a pine box being lowered could rebound from this morning.
But, later, as Jill and I hash out what to do next -- more schools, yes, but also a letter of complaint to the board of education? -- I remember a time when other professionals reached opinions about my kid, and then refused to back off. People you run across when trying to get your kid on in life just don't voice opinions only to later back off them.
When I call the principal of this school the following morning to suggest another try ("seemed to be an atypical morning for everyone," I venture, holding back from asking why somebody couldn't have been a little more welcoming and just plain polite during an "emergency meeting"), her response reminds of my time on the police beat: the same kind of stance, the same brand of inflexibility. "Nothing to see here," the principal seemed to say.
On some of the last of grandma's advice, we're telling Ned that it's he who's trying out the schools, not the other way around. Not that I hold Ned up as the paragon for little-kid behavior. He has fits. He pesters the cat until he almost gets bit. He doesn't eat his peas or his beef stew. Then he pesters Alex until he does get bit.
"What happened at the school today, Ned?" I ask that evening. "Just didn't like it?"
"Nah," he replies, not looking up. "Just didn't like it."
Jill really wanted that school. I wasn't at the school. I was at the graveside, in that rain, and any classroom that doesn't take this kid isn't the place for him, and no maybe to it. (February 2005)
Alex likes Hebrew Nationals for dinner these days. So does Ned, as anyone would. Problem is, Ned also likes and eats a lot of other stuff, and we don't necessarily want him eating three hot dogs for dinner. So in the kit hen Jill cooked the hot dogs, but had to tell Ned that he was going to have ravioli and squash for diner. I was standing at the dining room table when Ned rounded the corner and said into his toy phone, "Hello, police Mommy is making hot dogs for Alex and she isn't going to give me any!"
A few nights later, Ned caught sight of our wedding snapshot on the bedroom bulletin board. "You got married!" he announced to Jill. "You got married with my dad!" He hugged and kissed mommy, as Jill recalls, "to commemorate this happy event."
"Where were you?" he wanted to know. Jill told him we got married at Aunt Judie's house. Paused. He frowned. "You went without me!" he cried.
You get the idea. Talking with Ned is a trip. I try to not make it a guilty trip, because Alex's talking is still pretty what Ned calls "hard." I've had dozens of conversations with Ned already, and he's not shy about the verbal pats on the back.
"I'm so proud of you, dad!" he tells me. "You're a good boy!"
In Barnes and Noble, I haul him over to look at my book, right there on the shelf. "Who's that, Ned?" I exclaim, pointing to Alex's headshot on the back of the dust jacket.
"Alex!" exclaims Ned, then he bolts back to the display of The Incredibles.
Ned does still reply "Yeeech!" when he encounters some of Jill's cooking that he doesn't like (despite having wolfed it just a few weeks ago, but that explanation to his mom requires, lucky for him, more English than Ned yet has), and he probably screeches more than is strictly necessary while playing "pillow" (a sort of bed-based NFL line of scrimmage, with me as the biggest defensive end). But all in all words are becoming more a part of just dealing with Ned. Which he have to do.
Time for bed, Ned.
"I'm not hearing that!" he'll claim.
Time for bed, Ned.
"I don't want you saying that word anymore."
What word? "Bed," he says.
I passed him once as he was kicking back on the couch and asked what he was doing. "Takin' a break," he said. Jill reports that Ned is also "blindly and robotically" (the loving mother - teach him to "yeeeech!" her cooking) repeating phrases freom TV, and that the other day he told her she had to buy Apple Jacks "because it's part of this complete breakfast." We don't want Ned watching too much Nickelodeon because we don't want him falling for the lies of contemporary advertising, such as that a "complete breakfast" comes with yogurt and strawberries and not bacon and toast with butter.
Still, it is cute.
"Stop LAUGHING at me!"
I'm laughing with you, Ned.
"Stop LAUGHING at me!"
He jabs a finger. His eyebrows crash together; his chin dips with what he must think is overpowering threat and dignity. "I'm not joooo-king!"
Funny stuff. Like when he stepped on the hard plastic octopus that Alex plays with in the bath and often flings on the floor afterward.
"Damned fucking toys!"
Whereupon the nearer parent yanks the reins. "Ned," Jill will say calmly. "We don't use those words, because they hurt people's feelings. We don't use those words, Ned." Of course we do, mostly me, when I step on something hard and plastic (I admire Jill's self-control, even I can't always equal it). With visions of notes home from his kindergarten next fall, I add, "That's right, Ned. You and Alex should just pick up your toys when you're done with them" Nice and calm. Don't make a big deal about it. Now we've taught him to talk by speaking to him, we have to cash in before he learns how to use silence, too. Like about 12 years from now, when I'll probably spend a few evenings dying for him to talk to me.
You'll understand when you're grown up, Ned. Are you grown up?
"Not as yet," he replies. (February 2005)
Ned had to have speech therapy a few years ago. Even then, upon meeting him, one therapist said, "He seems like a nice, friendly little guy."
Too true. Ned seems to think everybody's his friend. There's an older boy in our building; he must be about 10. Friendly enough with kids his own age, from what I've seen, like many boys, but visibly unmoved by toddlers. Ned counts him as a friend, as seriously as if they'd lived in same dorm then worked together at the same dot-com for half a decade. "Yeah, Terry's my best friend," says Ned.
I guess I wasn't moved by toddlers either, especially, until I had one. "Well you know, Ned," I say, "Terry's kind of older than you are."
"Yeah. He's my friend."
Oh, Ned. I tell myself it doesn't matter at Ned's age.
A few months ago, Ned and I were on a downtown bus on Fifth Avenue, and we took a seat next to kids who were maybe 8 or 9, two boys and a girl. After a few minutes, it was apparent that Ned kept looking at them and looking at them. We passed a church that has an elementary school adjacent. The kids started talking about that school, which is where they go, on a block of the Upper East Side that contains more money than the whole state I grew up in. Ned started telling them how Jill bought a fold-up tunnel at a thrift sale at that church. Then I think he added something about how his friend Annette comes to our apartment and plays in the tunnel, too. And Alex. And a few other dear friends and acquaintances of Ned that these kids didn't seem too interested in knowing about.
"Okay kid, okay kid, that's enough," one of them said, half to himself and his companions. Not admonishing or bullying, just dismissive. Just dismissive. This is how kids talk. How they've always talked. Ned continued on about Andy, another friend. Okay kid, okay kid. They got off the bus. Ned watched them leave.
He seemed unmoved. Maybe he's used to this with Alex, who I think has yet to answer any of the thousands of questions Ned has asked him. "You didn't have to be nice to those kids, Ned," I tell him. "If you're nice to someone and they're not nice back, you don't have to be nice to them." Was this the right thing to say? Ned has all the makings of an outstanding salesman - gregarious, genuinely happy to see most people (at least so far), yet occasionally showing a thick skin for dismissal.
Still, life can be tough on a nice, friendly little guy who thinks everyone's on his side. I was 24 years old, for instance, before I learned that I may have had my dreams, but other people had theirs, too, and it was, for me, suddenly clear that year which they considered more important. For the longest time, and still, when somebody says something I think makes no sense, something that runs contrary to how I know my world works, I honestly think they have to be just fooling.
There's a lovely little girl at pre-school of whom Ned is fond. She's chilly, to put it mildly, and will probably grow up to be one of those chilly, lovely women that Ned's dad has sometimes had questionable luck avoiding. "She's my best friend," says Ned.
What qualifies me to give someone like Ned advice that he may carry through the next seven decades? Who am I to try to set straight a future Salesman of the Month? The other day on a big slide, for instance, he tried to draw the attention of an older boy who was sitting nearby atop monkey bars. "Watch me, big kid, watch me," Ned said before he zipped down the slide. He hit the ground and headed over to stand at the foot of the monkey bars. "Did you see me?" he asked the big kid. "Would you like to go down the slide?"
"No," the kid answered.
Ned paused, wrinkling his nose. "Why do you think you wouldn't want to go down the slide?" he asked. The kid left.
Not that he's a lousy judge of character: Annette, one of his best girlfriends, is a sweet little kid who, at her birthday party, took cake out of her own mouth to give to Ned. I wouldn't even do that.
"Annie has a boyfriend," Ned announced one night.
"Who's that?" I asked, as if I didn't know.
I didn't know; it was some guy I'd never heard of. Ned seemed unmoved. You know when he's unmoved. You know when he's moved, too. Tears. Stamping feet. Screeching. All that stuff that should be allowed longer in life than it is.
"We've got to talk to Ned about when he thinks somebody has hurt his feelings," says Jill. "Hurt my feelings" is one of Ned's bedrock phrases, and it can mean anything from "Took a toy away from me" to "Bit me." We do have to teach him what do to in those moments. I will, too, just as soon as I learn myself. (March 2005)
I figured Ned was the kind of friendly kid who would have a terrific time in school. Yet, over by that ramp and the Matchbox cars this sunny morning in this private school's garden, I see trouble. Ned and another boy, the same boy with whom Ned was joyfully slapping blocks together just a half hour before, are jostling over a car. Ned doesn't want to share; Ned sulks off to sit in a chair. He crosses his arms. Oh god, he's crossed his arms. The 2-year-old little girl, daughter of one of the teachers, toddles over to look at a plastic lizard on Ned's T shirt. Ned clinches his arms tighter, and pivots away from her in his chair. Oh god.
This is a nice school, and this has been a tranquil sunny morning for Ned. The school is run by an elderly man, with patient and nurturing ideas about getting little kids used to school. I believe they'dd be kind to Ned, who's already been contaminated by too much TV, and who wrestles every day with trying to talk to an autistic big brother. Ned hasn't spent a lot of time around other kids -- not compared with some of the pre-K veterans who will soon be his kindergarten classmates -- and he tends to think that "He hurt my feelings!" is some kind of phrase that will magically explain, and solve, too many situations.
As I watch and rise from my seat, ready to spring, Ned does not shove the little girl, but gradually unfolds his arms and works himself back into the car-and-ramp group. Come pick-up time, Ned does his share, and the kids all troop back inside to do art. There, over the tracing pencils and the vast drawing paper, the rest of Ned's morning unravels. I don't see exactly what happens. One of the assistant teachers looms over him and insists that he try to do his tracing over, that he hasn't got the knack of it yet. I look away for a second, and when I look back, he's racing toward my pants-leg.
"I want to go home!" he says, and buries his face in my leg. We head out with just a hint of rapidity, but it was almost time to leave anyway. The man who runs the school is on the phone, and we don't get a chance to say goodbye.
On the way home, I imagine Jill's maternal sympathy kicking in at news of this scene. "My buttery little Nedlet," she'll say, and will gather him in her arms. Later, while she's making dinner, I tell her how the teacher urged Ned to do the tracing over.
"Well good," says Jill, "because if he pulls that crap in the real world, they'll straighten him out quick! I think Ned thinks school is just this place where you go on occasion with mom or dad, and when you want to pack it in, you just say, 'I wanna go home!'"
I tell Jill that I thought this would be the point in the conversation where she'd be saying something like, "My buttery little Nedlet."
"Do I have his number or what?" Jill says, knifing a potato.
This fall, Ned will likely enter a combination kindergarten and pre-K class. School's changed a lot since I was half a decade old: My kindergarten was just the morning or the afternoon, for instance. Now, kids go all day. That will be a long day for a toddler who sleeps in like a frat brother, who rolls out about 9 or so to catch an hour of "Sponge Bob." Jill and I wish, of course, that we'd gotten Ned into a pre-K class last fall, but cracking a pre-K in Manhattan is like trying to get into Annapolis.
Still, this is the kid who conducted himself with that silent dignity throughout his grandmother's funeral and the graveside service. I said then and I say now that after that cold December day, any school that doesn't believe Ned has what it takes can get bent. He'll get the hang of this school thing. Then our family will have about seven years of good stuff while Ned gets the hang of the real world. After that, I'll probably long for the day when all he did when he was mad was cross his arms. (April 2005)
Every weeknight after a hard day of work and computer Freecell, I come home to my building, ride the elevator up to my floor, approach my front door with my keys in my pocket. I pause, tipping up my baseball hat and listening to the sound of the opera singer practicing in her apartment down by the trash room. And I knock at my door.
"Ned, someone's at the door," I hear faintly from inside my own apartment. Nothing. I knock again. "Ned, someone's at the door..." The knob begins to turn; the door arches back to reveal an orange crack of the wall beyond, then more orange, then the licorice head of Toast my cat, then-
"Hi Ned!" Reactions vary. Sometimes he launches himself at my legs. Sometimes he raises his arms and says, "Huggy!" Sometimes he cascades into the bookshelves, shoved there by Alex who's bolted over to wiggle all over and hungrily help me unzip my jacket.
Sometimes Ned launches right into telling me, often in strangely grave tones, about his day ("Dad, I saw Adian today...") or something that happened to Toast ("Dad, Alex pulled Toast's tail..."), or something that happened to him ("Dad, Alex pushed me..."). Overall, though, I have to say it's all delight at seeing me home.
"Oh hurrah!" says Jill. "Daddy's home. Now you're not stuck with dull ol' mom."
I vary from this door jam ceremony at my peril. Before this stage of my fatherhood, I used to just walk in. I'd drop my back, wriggle out of my jacket (even Alex didn't pitch in then), and turn to begin a restful evening at home by carting out the trash and changing the shredded newspaper in the cat box. Then I'd turn around to see Ned's face dissolving over by the end of the dining room table.
"Oh NOOOO!" he'd wail, casting his arms into the air and deflating in a princess-like faint, followed by kicking and general flailing as he turned the volume knob on his fit farther and farther to the right.
"Ned, I had to come home. Get a grip on yourself."
"NOOOO!" As the waves of Ned's sound begin to make the tumblers rattle on the sideboard, I finally get to hang up my jacket and baseball hat, and wonder how I ever think of my second as "typically developing."
"Ned-" I touch his arm. He snaps his eyes from mine and pivots away, faces the pantry, the perfect picture of a little boy who will never again for the rest of his life gaze on anything but the inside the pantry. "All right, Ned, all right." Jill always advises me to just leave him alone when he gets like this. So I do, and set to work cleaning out the wastebaskets and the cat box.
"Ned, you want to help me with the garbage?"
More tumbler-rattling. I do want to stress that often Ned helps me with the garbage. Alex does, too - he can almost take it to the trash room himself. Tonight, however, over in the corner, through Ned's noise, he is intent on "Elmo": Alex has of course watched "Elmo" through much worse than this. I take out the trash. I can hear Ned all the way down to the trash room. What must the opera singer think? I come back to my door, stop, and knock.
Longer wait this time. Repeated muted utterances of "Ned, someone's at the door." The knob begins to turn; orange wall, head of Toast, then Ned, and-
"Oh!" he cries, his heart split. "You have to have your jackettttttttt!" He has a way of crying out the last word of a sentence like a guy falling down a deep well.
Oh for God's sake. I slip my jacket back on - Alex glances over from "Elmo" and must wonder what dad's up to now - and step out. Knock. Knock. Someone's at the door. Someone's at the door. I hear them inside, coaxing, pleading, trying to move this three feet of stubbornness toward the door
They must succeed, because I see the knob turn. There is silence. Ned is willing. Oh, Ned is willing. Slit of door, slice of orange, and the little face regards me. "Okay, Ned?"
"You need your hat," he says. (May 2005)
Ned faces challenges most of us never will. As the brother of an autistic sibling, his life won't be easy. Nowhere at the moment is this as clear as in front of the television, which Alex often owns when he's home. Alex surrenders the set, however, weekend mornings between 9 and 10 a.m., and weeknights at 8. Then, it's time for "Sponge Bob."
At first, I didn't watch "Sponge Bob" with Ned, the way parents are supposed to watch all their kids' TV. What parent does, really? Have you ever had to sit through most kids' TV? Gradually, however, the show has drawn me in to the point of occasionally turning to Ned and asking, "When are they going to make some new ones?!"
Sponge Bob is a sponge who lives in the sea in the place named Bikini Bottom. That's pretty funny, I just realized, but then sometimes the humor of this cartoon creeps up on me like that. Sponge Bob is relentlessly cheerful, and a lover of life with big eyes and big eyelashes, which could be why he's been bashed as being pro-gay. I don't know what that's about, and I'm pretty sure Ned doesn't either as he stares at the set with glassy eyes. Sponge Bob does not make you gay. I don't think. Though Ned does love to vacuum.
Sponge Bob has a starfish friend named Patrick who I find a little hard to take, as he's simple-minded in a fall-down kind of way. Sponge Bob also has a bitter acquaintance named Squidward. Squidward is caustic and biting, and claims he doesn't like Sponge Bob much except he's always hanging around and claiming he has better things to do. The show has a lot of depth when it comes to sealife relationships.
Sponge Bob's most interesting relationship to me is his job at a fast-food dive called the Krusty Krab, and which is run by a skinflint named Mr. Crabs. One episode that proved "Sponge Bob" isn't just for kids was the one done like a training and orientation video for new employees of the Krusty Krab. If you've ever had a crappy job that made you jump through a lot of hoops, watch this episode. And remember: "NO employee wants to be a Squidward!"
I think I'm spelling "Crabs" right. "I think it might be K-R-A-B-S," says Jill. "Don't you think you could find this online?"
Let's check Google to see if there's a Web site for "Sponge Bob." Ah. There are 3.72 million of them.
Ned is therefore lost in a cultural phenomenon, and not just in terms of Sponge Bob. "Part of this complete breakfast" has become one of his favorite phrases, for example, and so has, "We'll be right back after these important messages." Ned loves cultural phenomena. It might be a good thing he wasn't born in Germany around 1910.
Probably we've let Ned watch TV too much, but I remember being caught up in my own cultural phenomena around his age. Every week in the mid-'60s, I watched "Captain America." I remember selling something made out of paper and related to "The Banana Splits" to my mother and big brother around age five. I had a "Howdy Doody for President" bumper sticker stuck on my dresser. ("Sounds about your speed," my brother said. What did he know? He wasted a dime on some construction paper shaped like Fleegle and Drooper.) As far as television goes, I noticed at AGE FOUR that networks never broadcast promos for shows other than those on their own network. This struck my little mind during a promo for "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" over the credits of "Flipper."
"Networks did that? I never noticed," Jill recently admitted. She didn't even know about "Cheers" until she met me. As Ralph Kramden said once, "Isn't that sad?"
We certainly pull the plug on some shows we consider too violent or action-filled, those that seem to rev Ned up in a bad way. I never used to think TV did this to kids, but I couldn't deny that he was wound up after watching Star Trek: Nemesis with me. I was also wound up, "Star Trek" being a cultural phenomenon I continue to be lost on.
"Sponge Bob" doesn't wind Ned up in a bad way. He shouts along with the pirate singing the theme song, and watches glassy-eyed, just like any good American during a favorite show. He's even got Alex mildly interested in Bikini Bottom. And why not? Sponge Bob likes stuff; he has friends. He likes his job, and he seems to like being alive. I should be more like Sponge Bob.
(PS: Last night, "Sponge Bob" came on at 7:30. I asked Ned why it was now on earlier. "I dunno," he said. "Sometimes the TV people just do that.") (August 2005)
Recently Ned's questions have worn me down. Like the other night, when he'd been hammering Jill with conversation for hours and she asked him to please, please, just talk to daddy for a while. I looked at Ned, hoping he'd tell me about his day. Instead, he stuck his finger in his mouth, looked at the ceiling for a minute, took his finger out, and said, "What's under my tongue?"
At school, they say Ned is kind of like an 80-year-old man; one administrator called him "eccentric." I can buy that. And part of being eccentric is questioning. Some of his questions are cute. Upon being informed that his school was putting on a parents' talent show, for example, he asked, "Do you have any talent, dad?" I told him I didn't think I had the kind of talent they were looking for in a Friday evening performance. He agreed, and told everyone so in school.
"What was Dr. Seuss's first name?" he asked the other night, as we got ready to read before bed. I said I thought it was Theodore. I looked at the jackets of our Green Eggs, Cat In the Hat and Sneetches, but they all lacked author bios. Ned is five years old. How come I already have to dig for author bios?
"Did he want everyone to think he was doctor?" Ned asked. "Why are sea horses called 'horses'?"
Ned's got a lot of questions. Dad, thanks to Google and a boss who is way too lax with personal use of a company PC, has some answers.
Googling "Dr. Seuss" and "biography" directs me first to catinthehat.org, a site of Springfield, Massachusetts, birthplace of Theodore (ah-ha!) Seuss Geisel 102 years ago, and home of the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture. "The influence of Ted's memories of Springfield can be seen throughout his work," the site reads. "Drawings of Horton the Elephant meandering along streams in the Jungle of Nool, for example, mirror the watercourses in Springfield's Forest Park from the period. The truck driven by Sylvester McMonkey McBean in The Sneeches could well be the Knox tractor that young Ted saw on the streets of Springfield. In addition to its name, Ted's first children's book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, is filled with Springfield imagery, including a look-alike of Mayor Fordis Parker on the reviewing stand, and police officers riding red motorcycles, the traditional color of Springfield's famed Indian Motocycles." Wow. You learn something new you're your 5-year-old every day, though there's no mention of any medical degree.
"Why are they called 'sea horses'?" According to a couple of sites that popped up with URL's too long to even cut and paste, "sea horse" originates with the idea that King Neptune needed something to pull his chariot. I'm trying to figure out how to help Ned understand this concept, but "Answering Ned's Questions" doesn't pull up anything on Google.
"What's under my tongue?", however, typed into Google with quotation marks and question mark does turn up one entry, what appears to be a crude music blog. "Under the tongue" turns up 45.3 million entries, covering everything Ned could put under his tongue from pebbles to pills. Definitely hope he doesn't learn about those. Finally, the Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia site turns up a click-through anatomy lesson of the tongue, including Structure, White Tongue, Tongue Rolling, Trivia, and Secondary Uses (my office firewall prevented me clicking through on that last item). Under Ned's tongue may be a frenulum, according to the encyclopedia, but don't hold me to this.
"Actually," Jill said, "I do know what's under the tongue. It's called-" She may have said "frenulum," but don't hold me to this. I just don't have all the answers, and luckily Ned doesn't need them all yet. By the time he does he'll be online himself, and Dad's answers won't mean as much anymore. (May 2006)
Jill was taking Alex to Ikea on Saturday morning, so I decided to take Ned to Fleet Week. Fleet Week is an annual New York event during which a few U.S. Navy warships nose up the Hudson to a pier in the middle of Manhattan, and nestle themselves between the WWII aircraft carrier Intrepid, which is berthed there as a permanent museum, and cruise ships. The cruise ships are the biggest; Ned found the warships more interesting, even after having to wait on my shoulders in a five-block-long line while having to go to the bathroom. Alex wouldn't have made it, though I do intend to take him some year soon. (Alex doesn't mind Ikea, where he plays in the ball pit -- or at least he did last trip until they kicked him out because he kept trying to open the emergency exit door. Both boys have a growing interest in making adults other than their parents scramble.)
Ned finally got the bathroom moments after passing through what I think was his first metal detector while an absolutely huge Shore Patrol officer looked on. We boarded the U.S.S. Kearsarge, a small carrier that specializes in bringing its 1,700 marines close inshore where they can drive off in tanks, armored personnel carriers (APCs), humvees, attack helicopters, hovercraft, and other vehicles kids love to crawl around. I realize of course that any one of these vehicles costs about as much as 50 elementary schools, but all my life I have thought this stuff is just so cool!
So did Ned. "He enlisted!" I informed Jill in mid-afternoon.
"Don't let him sign anything," she replied.
Many parts of the Kearsarge were open to the hoards of visiting kids, their cries of excitement echoing off the gray walls of the hanger deck. I watched Ned vanish into the innards of an APC and emerge moments later on the top of the armor, into the arms of a yet another strapping and tan young marine. Ned then got to sit in the driver's seat of a humvee (a position just as suburban as military in contemporary America, if you want to get picky), and stab the horn of a flight deck tractor.
"Ned LOVED Fleet Week," I would later e-mail to my big brother, who lives in Maine, "especially crawling all over and in and out of an APC. He also pulled the trigger on a heavy machine gun, which should prepare him for deer hunting."
"Ned's training is starting a bit early," my brother e-mailed back, "so we'll hold off on the napalm education until he hits 'expert' with the .50 cal." My brother is in no small part responsible for me thinking this stuff is cool!
Ned squatted at a six-foot long machine gun and used his tiny thumbs to make the big, big trigger go clack. I stopped over what looked like a 5th grader in desert fatigues at another exhibit, who was showing the crowd how to strip an M-16.
"How old are you?" someone asked.
"Just turned 18, sir!"
Up on the flight deck, Ned sat in the cockpit of the attack helicopter. Through the Plexiglas I saw him in there hogging the pilot's seat, yanking at the stick and punching every red button until a tense mom tapped on the Plexiglas and tried to make him hear that there was quite a line behind him for the seat.
Every red button he could find, I later told Joe, an ex-infantry officer. "That's trouble for somebody!" said Joe. Joe has a 2-year-old son. Joe was also wounded in Mogadishu about 15 years ago: first shot by a sniper, then moments later peppered with shrapnel.
Last stop was the line of tables where they were giving away Fleet Week posters to the kids and selling T shirts and baseball hats to benefit the ship's Family Fund, which I'm guessing helps the folks back home while dad -- and mom these days -- is at sea. I bought a hat, and talked to one sailor from North Carolina. "First time in New York? Got any liberty yet?" I asked, sounding like either an ex-sailor or a dork who thought all this stuff was cool.
Yessir, the sailor said, first time in New York, and yes he'd had some time off the ship. I asked what he'd seen. "The Statue of Liberty," he said, "and Ground Zero."
Ned didn't want a T shirt. After I bought my Kearsarge hat, I found him with another boy; they were both using their rolled up posters to pretend to fence. I'm not sure who won before we had to go home. (June 2006)
Once More, Once More to the Lake
We spend Father's Day at grandpa's lake house. In the afternoon, I hope to take out grandpa's sleek kayak while Jill takes the boys in the rowboat and we all play "Surfaced U-Boat Stalks Lost Allied Merchantman on Father's Day, 1941," but instead Jill takes Alex to some mall and Ned and I go fishing in grandpa's canoe.
Grandpa had found two old fishing poles in the shed when he bought this place last summer; I assume the spiders in the shed were done with the poles, and they (the poles) have served Ned and I well in practicing our casting. Casting, in case you respect fish and aren't fond of being kind of bored while you and your 5-year-old get sunburns, involves trying to snap your lure and bobber out as far as possible and then reel it back in a way that convinces a fish to maybe give up its life.
There are fish in this lake, somewhere. This afternoon, Ned and I practice casting off the dock. I use a pale plastic worm; Ned uses a faded pink plastic worm that for years to come we will be able to spot up there in the branch over the dock. But soon Ned's actually not too bad, getting most casts a respectful distance over the shorefront algae, and once or twice getting the fish to swim near our lures before they dart off, laughing.
"Ned," I say, "try to get your lure to act like a hurt little fish. Tug it a little bit like this. Then wait a minute, then tug it again like this..."
"God forbid you should actually catch anything," says grandpa back on the porch, where he offers more effective lures. I decline: The point this Father's Day is not to catch, but to acquaint Ned with real fishing.
The best teacher would be my brother, Uncle Lee, who's up in Maine and who's been fishing since before he was Ned's age. Uncle Lee (who as my big brother was of course not "Uncle Lee" but "He Who Hits Me a Lot") lent fishing a mystique from the time I was only six, when we were at our grandmother's one Sunday morning and He informed me that He was going to get to go fishing while I was "sitting on my brain in church." Every spring, I'd watch Lee pick through his gray metal tacklebox containing spools of line, lures of obscenely bright color, and hooks I knew I'd never get out of my eye.
Lee took me fishing a few years after "church"; I remember hanging my feet off some bridge while cars zipped by about five feet away. I think I caught two sunfish, a type of ugly species that even cats turn down. A few years later, Lee took me out for a day on the canoe, during which I fumbled his needle-nose pliers overboard and caught two fish and a future-sarcoma-grade sunburn. I haven't fished much since.
I feel this Father's Day is practice for when Ned joins Uncle Lee to truly fish. I knot new lures to our lines: a bright green one for me, and a minnow-white one for Ned. "Ned, you have to do everything I tell you," I say. "When you go out someday with Uncle Lee, you'll have to do everything he says. Stand over there while I get the canoe unpadlocked from the tree." Of course Ned soon wanders near me on the dock, and his fishing career nearly starts with an aluminum bow in his face. He's wearing the blue life vest that Uncle Rob and Aunt Julie bought the boys a year ago. It encased Ned last year; this afternoon it's no bigger on him than a real Navy life vest might be on me.
The canoe slides into the water. "Okay, Ned, step aboard."
Ned does. I consider switching again to the more-stable rowboat (the "Merchantman"), but there's something about the whisp of a canoe through the water that says Fishing on Father's Day. I haven't handled a canoe solo in years. I pick a paddle from several in the shed as if picking a pool cue, and I'm not settled in the stern of our aluminum Pequod five minutes before I realize I picked a paddle that's too short. In two more minutes, I realize I'm actually sitting backwards in the bow. In three, I remember why He always brought boat cushions to sit on.
"Okay, Ned. Cast!" His rod and the hook of his lure whiz by a few inches from my nose. "Ned, watch the rod, please!"
"Sorry. Could you cast on the other side, dad?"
We settle into cast, paddle, cast, paddle, untangle our lines, cast, paddle, pull the unearthly long green weeds off our hooks. It's hot, all sun and sultry, little breeze to make the wavelets chuck under our bow (stern). I think about Ned and sarcoma.
"Wanna head for that island?" says Ned. We do. I nestle the canoe into a small mossy cove, trying hard not to impale Ned on the dead branches hanging over the water precisely at the level of his shoulder blades. He steps onto what I proclaim Edwin Island.
"Edwin Island?" he says. "Dad, don't leave!"
"I'm just maneuvering into a better berth," I say. In fact, I'm trying to find a stable spot so I can haul my aching rump into the real bow.
Ned re-boards. We move out and trace a lazy 8 across the water, Ned casting, me and my paddle trying to hug the shore and the shade. Ned smears on sunscreen until he looks like he's putting on Kabuki makeup. He says the life vest is hot. He casts and casts, and his eyes narrow and his mouth settles in a thin line. "What do we have to drink?" he asks. I hand him a bottle of lemony seltzer. He swigs it and casts, swigs it and casts. He rubs at the white globs of sunscreen on his cheek. He swigs.
We catch nothing. "I wanna go in," he says at last, but not in the defeat of a disappointed boy. It's a tired guy who's ready for a drink with ice, and cartoons on the TV in the basement. We head in, and after I return to the rods to the spiders and re-chain the canoe to the tree, I find him in the basement of the lake house, sipping Sprite. I sip beer and we watch "Tom and Jerry" until Jill comes home.
She asks Ned what he's doing. Sitting on the bed, he nods to her, watching cartoons. He hefts his Sprite.
"He looked old there on the bed," Jill will say later. "'Sittin' on the bed. Watchin' cartoons.' He looked like he was holding a gin and tonic." Fishermen drink beer, but I don't correct her. (June 2006)
All summer, Ned's worn the face of a kid who seems to be making the best of it. We paid $2,600 -- peanuts, I know, compared with the fees of some day camps -- for him to attend a day camp: swimming, sports, arts and crafts, the brand of fun to be had in life before you realize how miserable humidity makes you.
But since late June, when he started camp, he's answered questions about his days with at best single syllables ("Good") or near-pleas to change the subject. He hung back almost from the first from the other kids at his bus stop, though on the first morning he did try to romp with two older boys who paid him attention only to make little Vs of their fingers behind his head. I watched this, and tried to remember from the height of my 44 years if this was just a little guys' way of playing. I reached no conclusion by the time Ned was gone on the bus, and on the mornings since he's simply kept his distance from all the kids while waiting to be picked up.
Never once has Ned burst with a sense of fun, like he often did in his excellent kindergarten. Maybe it's just that this camp isn't kindergarten, I told myself, listening to the single syllables. The bus is often late in the evening. They don't use quite enough sunscreen on Ned, despite our instructions. The whole summertime routine is feeling a lot like work feels the rest of the year, only with a heat/humidity index. Still, I guess it's something for Ned to do.
Then one morning on the subway to the bus stop, I just asked if he liked camp. He shook his head. "There's a problem," Ned said. I knew what it was. I was a little guy once. Funny, but I always thought Alex would be first to run afoul of a bully.
There was a kid who wouldn't leave Ned alone. Near as I could make out through the fog of the five-year-old vocabulary and half-shamed mutterings, there was a boy who stamped on Ned's feet, pushed him, and even hit him -- sometimes on the head: Oscar (not his real name).
How old is Oscar? I demand.
Four. Ned is five. Is Oscar bigger than you, Ned? No, smaller. I can't discount Ned's powers of observation, though I do think he has a lot to learn about how this bullying thing works.
"Tell your counselor," I advise Ned on the subway, as across the aisle a homeless man giggles to us. I try to keep Ned talking so he doesn't glance at the homeless man. "Tell your counselor. He'll straighten things out," I say.
"He's not like you," Ned replies. "He's not good at straightening things out."
The sweetness of that comment floats me all the way to the bus stop. This morning Ned has brought a little toy, a palm-sized plastic video game from Burger King. He's not supposed to bring toys to camp, but he's brought the game today, I think, to comfort himself. One of the older boys who made the V with his fingers on the first morning comes up to Ned. The boy is wearing stupid sunglasses.
"You can't bring toys to camp!" Mr. V says. "We learned that on the first day! Jeeez..."
Ned shrugs at the boy, laying on him the same expression he used on the homeless giggling man on the subway. Mr. V leaves. "Let's put the toy in your backpack, Ned," I say.
"Why don't I just let you keep it for the day," Ned says, all practicality.
That evening, I tell Jill about Mr. V. "What - an - asshole!" Jill says.
Oscar keeps at Ned, so we hear. Oscar gets Ned to say a bad word. Oscar Oscar Oscar. Jill and I have the first of the big talks with Ned. She tells him it's okay to defend himself. I tell him that if anyone pushes him, he has a right to push right back, and yell for the kid to stop at the top of his voice. Ned smiles -- I used to smile, too; I could never believe somebody honestly wanted to give me trouble -- and a couple of times I wonder if Ned is pulling my leg. We have told him about the short story "Charles." Oscar, Mr. Stimpson? We have no "Oscar" registered at camp...
"I don't think Ned is kidding," says Jill. "For one thing, he keeps wanting to talk about it."
On this morning at the bus stop, there is a new boy, a small boy with brown eyes and dark hair. His dad has brought him, on a bike. The boy is crying and holding on to his dad's leg. A counselor gets off the bus and bends down to talk to the boy in soft tones. The dad bends over, too. The boy is wiping his eyes.
"Ned?" I call through the side bus window. "Do you know that boy?" Ned shakes his head. "Well, when you all get to camp, give that boy a pat on the back." I don't know if Ned hears me, or if he understands, before the bus pulls off.
(PS: Ned and Oscar had another run-in. A counselor told Ned he "wasn't a very good camper," and that my advice on pushing back was "unfriendly." "Ned," I explained, "I never intended it to be friendly." Unfriendly! What - an - asshole. We're trying to transfer Ned to another camp.) (July 2006)
Ned and I were walking home with the snap-together model plane I'd just bought him when he said, "Thank you, dad. This is a perfect gift for a loose-toothed boy." Ned is loose-toothed, or was.
Maybe a week and a half later, he and Alex and our babysitter came through the door and Ned began showing his gap. He was bursting with pride. Jill wanted to cry. Ned's face was also smeared with blue, but I don't know what was going on with that. That night, Jill had Ned write a note to the tooth fairy. On the note he also drew a picture of himself smiling and holding his tooth. Soon after, he went to sleep.
"So five dollars?" I said to Jill. She wavered on the amount, saying it was too high. Oh Christ. I happen to think you should give a kid about the same amount for his first baby tooth as a gallon of gasoline costs. I know when Jill reads this she'll think I'm even further off my rocker; she's hatched the idea that I throw money at Ned. Nonetheless, about 9:30 or so that night, Ned was firmly asleep and Jill and I agreed on leaving him a $5 bill. Then we both discovered that all we had was twenties.
Ned deserves a good gift from the tooth fairy. First, it's his first baby tooth, which now we have in a tin up on the bookshelf. It's tinged with blue; I asked him about it last night, and he replied, "Oh, that's ink." It's a little bigger than a BB. Plus, first grade has been a bitch for Ned, partially because he had a fabulous kindergarten teacher, and partially because none of us saw coming his whole days spent planted at a desk, writing, writing, reading, writing. For some reason we never saw coming the real beginning of Ned's training as an American worker.
Ned's makes the best of it. He sticks to his homework, resisting what I think Richard Yates termed "the luxury of collapse" whenever he incorrectly guesses that a word ends with C instead of K, or when he puts the tail of the small G on the wrong side.
It's also worth noting that in that drawing of Ned smiling and drawing a tooth, Ned also drew Alex smiling and holding a tooth. I think that was nice. Alex has been losing teeth for a while; the last one was I didn't even notice until I looked over and happened to see a smear of blood across Alex's cheek. Another was gone, bottom front. God knows where it went (we've looked). We have none of Alex's baby teeth, and like they say about prime real estate, they aren't making any more.
We dug up five singles for Ned, and Jill wrote him a note from the Tooth Fairy, telling him that the first tooth is special. I remember the feeling: the wobble, the lean, the itchy stretch of gum that's getting ready to push a tooth out and push the owner of the mouth one step further down the road. Jill still feels like crying.
With the passing of teeth, I like to tell myself, the boys are growing into what I hope will be Prime Dad Years: blobs no longer, using a toilet with about the same accuracy as dad. Years when I can just plain do more stuff with my sons, like building model airplanes, years after toddlerhood and before the they dive deep for about a decade into the teenage years. When they re-surface, who knows what they'll think of dad.
Ned's been asking about his grandparents, and to see pictures of me as a baby. "Your dad died?" he will ask, and I'll say oh yes, many years ago. "That's sad," Ned will say. There are some pictures somewhere, black-and-whites of my dad in "the yard" in a white T, hair combed back and a Raleigh stuck in his lips, beside my shockingly young mother in her dotted dress, both of them looking like members of the French Resistance. Of me there are fading color snapshots with fat white borders, and in the borders, in fine black letters, are the month and year of the printing. Remember those?
I e-mail my sister in Arizona, the only family guardian left of these treasures, and tell her to find someone to help her scan the photos in and e-mail them to me, so the photos will never have to leave her house. That's best for those photos; they're not making any more. (October 2006)
I was going to talk about Ned's homework here, but I've decided to put that off, which is ironic as I was going to be writing about Ned putting off his homework. Anyway, I'm going to talk about model kits.
I built models all through those years when I should have been dating. A year ago I started in on Ned about this and bought him a snap-together Mir space station, which sadly held together about as well as the real thing. More recently, he and I built a 1/72-scale snap-together Tomcat Navy fighter. I bought it for him when he was losing his first tooth. "This is a great model for a loose-toothed boy," he proclaimed. The plane is now atop our dining room bookcase, minus the missiles and one horizontal stabilizer. That's okay: We're not building these models for show, or even for keeps.
For Christmas I have stashed for Ned a 1/48-scale snap-together Tiger I, one of the main German battle tanks of World War II. (Happy holidays! Tanks for the memories!) I built this very kit in 1978, when it was made by a different company. I painted it flat dark green, with dirty amber camouflage stripes. I then lovingly melted one of the fenders as if the tank had hit a tree or boulder, and with a hot safety pin scraped and scarred one side of the turret; I painted the scar gray, with a little silver to depict freshly shot-up metal.
"Tanks for the memories" is not mine, but from the 1975 catalog of a Japanese model-kit maker named Tamiya. Those who have looked at this catalog and maybe have added "Tamiya" to their spell-checker will appreciate what I'm trying to do to Ned. We do other things, of course: We're playing the old American Heritage game Dogfight (Ned has beaten me twice), and soon I hope we play Hit the Beach! and Skirmish. Those who remember those games will also appreciate what I'm trying to do to Ned. (And hey, I appreciate Sorry as much as the next guy, but Dogfight's in the Smithsonian!)
Tamiya made the premier kits when I was building. They had the sharpest detail and the smoothest decals, and I could never afford them. About the best I ever did was the Stuart, a small American tank from World War II, in 1/35 scale. I think the kit cost about $9 in 1977. Today, however, I have a job and I also have a Tamiya Flakpanzer kit in Jill's front closet. I bought that kit a few years ago at a church sale; it was $2, and unopened.
"Dad," Ned has asked, "can we build that toy that's in mom's closet?"
Poor baby. Okay, first off it's a model kit and not a toy. And second, I could barely have handled the 1/35th Tamiya Flakpanzer even after I'd reached the age when I should have been asking Kristi Immel to a movie.
A month or so ago, I bought Ned a snap-together (we'll get into glue later) Patton tank, and when we got to the painting my heart swelled at how adept he was at "weathering" the tank with tiny streaks of gray, for worn paint, and tan, for mud. (Alex is also quite good at figuring out how pieces go together.)
I like to think I'm doing something for Ned beyond showing him what color Germany painted its military vehicles on the Russian Front. I hope I'm giving him something to hold onto. The first time we visited one of Manhattan's few remaining hobby shops, for instance, the old guy behind the counter gave Ned a balsa wood glider, free. "These gliders are fun. Hobby shops should be fun," the man told Ned, looking forward perhaps not just to the day when Ned might walk in with some real cash, but also the day when another young person will have joined a club that's at once solitary and nurturing.
This Christmas I also have stashed a snap-together starship Enterprise and a snap-together Klingon battlecruiser. "Ned," I asked him a couple of weeks ago, "if you built another model, would you like a plane or a tank or a spaceship?"
"Spaceship!" he cried. Before I know it, of course, I won't be able to write ahead of time about Ned's Christmas presents without ruining his surprise.
I hope his passion doesn't get diluted by math and playdates and all the other stuff Ned has to handle. Does building excite him, truly, deep in his heart, like swimming after school and knitting with his mom? I hope building stays fun for him, but let's face it: Not that many people have added "Tamiya" to their spellchecker. (December 2006)
I had a goldfish. He died when I was about Ned's age, my first pet to die, and as I stood in the backyard that afternoon beside my mother and my fish in a matchbox and as I stared into the raw earth of the hole, I heard my brother remark to my father in the background, "The Kennedy funeral."
On a recent Wednesday night, I went in to the boys' room for a look at the bowl, and saw them floating. I walked back to Jill who was at the computer; I must have looked like JFK had been shot again. "Jill," I said, "Vivian and Little-o are dead."
"Whaa-aat???" She breathed the word out in that way she reserves for dire shocks.
Vivian and Little-o were shimmering orange and white beauties given to Ned by one of our babysitters only a week before. They arrived in a square plastic carrying bowl. Poor Ned, poor Ned, I think, watching him sleep. For an instant I feel I must wake him; I'm almost unable to bare this news myself. Of course I don't wake him. I drape a napkin over their bowl and take it into our bedroom. Jill and I conclude that maybe their bowl was too small. "I hope their time with us was happy," Jill says, "that they didn't just spend their last two days gasping and choking." Ned named them. Little-o was slender, and spent a lot of time in the bottom of the bowl. Vivian is the name of Ned's first-grade teacher. Poor Ned. Death has touched our home for the first time.
Next morning, I ask him to the couch. "Ned, I have some bad news about Vivian and Little-o."
"They're dead?" he says. How did he know? He's only six and I think he shouldn't be able to guess, somehow, that it was for me to tell him. He buries his face in the couch cushions and seems to weep. Jill comes over and he hugs her. "I want you write about this," he murmurs. In a minute, however-
"I see you smiling," Jill says to him. Smiling? Well, the fish were only here a week.
At Ned's request, we take them to the Harlem Meer, a pond in nearby Central Park. As Ned stands on the concrete steps leading down to the water, Alex tugs at my arms. The New York City ducks that live in the Meer cruise over to see what we've got. "The ducks will eat them!" Ned cries. We hustle him away.
"I don't think the ducks would eat them, do you?" Jill asks me later.
By Thursday afternoon, I'm scouting bowls and new fish in Petco. I take a quick liking to the black fish with the bulging eyes, and the one-gallon fishbowls. "When you have one fish, it's in a fishbowl," Ned has informed me. "When you have two fish, they're in an aquarium."
What we buy: a $30, 1.5-gallon tank/aquarium with a filter and a tube that makes bubbles; black and white pebbles; a hollow rock with holes in the side so they can swim in and out; and a long-finned goldfish destined to be named Supergold and a black fish will bulgy eyes that Ned names Black Bat.
I tell Jill that Black Bat -- who quickly learns to shimmy into the hollow rock and peek out - looks like a cross between our old Burmese cat Mimi and actor Steve Buscemi. Especially after I say that (Jill has a thing, I think, for Steve Buscemi), she admits to beginning to love Black Bat. "Never thought I could feel something for a fish," she marvels. In the decades since the afternoon of the raw earth I've lost Soda, Tiger, Rowdy, Bugs, Hotspur, Monroe, and Mimi. I know what is to bury a pet, though none was a fish.
Jill scouts the Web for tips on not killing Supergold and Black Bat. One day later she e-mails me. "From everything I've read," she writes, "these stupid fish are going to get big, like anywhere from 4 to 5 to 10 to 12 inches. Gross! Horrifying! Just imagine a 15-inch, silent, glowering Black Bat."
Vivian and Little-o, you gave your lives to make us fish owners. (January 2007)
Alex and Ned will learn together for a while, side-by-side, until that one grade when Ned surpasses Alex. "Ned will eventually be more the big brother," a friend said recently, and the trend has already begun with Ned calling some of Alex's video choices "baby shows." "Is he gonna watch this when he's a grown-up?" Ned demands to know.
Every now and then, however, a show comes along you watch as a kid and as an adult. At seven one morning Ned says to me, "Hey dad, 'Star Trek' is on!" My first thought is not delight in having Kirk and the old crew back on my set where they belong, but wonderment at what in hell it's doing on at seven in the morning when TVLand clogs its airwaves every evening with "Little House on the Prairie" and "The Andy Griffith Show." And not the ones with Don Knotts.
"Hey," Ned says, "that's the ship we built!"
Dad does not give you bum gifts, Ned. He was referring to the snap-together model kit I gave him during the Christmas/Hanukkah/Ned's Birthday Blizzard of last month. The prize present, the kit that to build with my son would consummate my fatherhood: the Klingon battlecruiser. First one I passed to Ned on Christmas morning.
He unwrapped the box and said, "Dad, it's great! I love it! What is it?"
Ned had no frame of reference for a Klingon ship. I mentally ran through the episodes for one with a Klingon ship in action. Not many episodes fit that bill, at least few that would impress Ned, as special effects when "Trek" was made had more to do with flashlights than computer graphics. There'd be no shortcut to sharing the show with Ned.
Not long after that, Ned found "Star Trek" -- or "Trek" as fans knew it for all those years when they should have been asking girls out, or "TOS" ("The Original Series" as its come to be known in the wake of spin-offs. I could never wholly jump in the saddle with the corporate tone of "Next Generation" ("TNG") or the neighborhood feel of "Deep Space Nine" ("DS9"), and TOS seemed to be have been penned by guys who'd fought in World War II, and who set to the stars their own Big Three (Kirk, Spock, and McCoy) to fight for the free galaxy.
"Ned, you're going to like this show," I said. "It's a got a lot more action than the newer one." First episode we watched - and taped - was the one where kids survive a colony's being wiped out by an alien. The alien uses the kids to launch a takeover of the galaxy, and sneaks aboard the Enterprise and he does pretty well until he runs into William Shatner.
(I, a Trek guy from about 1971, in fact know the title and could take a good guess at the original airdate of this and every other episode, but I feel that that would somehow alienate readers.)
(I do not answer to the labels "Trekkie" or "Trekker.")
Ned got behind the kids episode, and was especially taken by how the alien changed in appearance from a kindly old fat uncle type to a slag-encrusted gorgon. "Did he die at the end?" Ned asked.
"No. That's the way he really looked," I replied. "The children and the crewmen were seeing things. And so were you all through the episode!"
I ask Ned what he thinks is going to happen, how he thinks each story will end. "They're solid stories," notes Jill. Pretty soon Ned is also showing a mind for tactics, such as when we discover a supposedly dead Captain Kirk costumed like a Romulan ("The Enterprise Incident," original airdate Sept. 27, 1968). "He's going to board the bad guys' ship!" Ned cried.
And after another episode ("Spectre of the Gun," Oct. 25, 1968): "Then Captain Kirk pulled out his gun and was going to kill that guy!"
"But Captain Kirk didn't kill him, did he, Ned? That was the whole point. That's why the alien at the end there let the Enterprise approach his planet -- he had seen that Kirk was peaceful!" Solid.
So many strange new worlds out there: the gangster one, the Nazi one, the evil Enterprise, and the one with the Tribbles. The big question is, how do I think this story is going to end? (January 2007)
In afterschool, before he went swimming or did his hour of art of bongo-drumming, Ned did all his homework. Except math. "I want to do it at home," Ned said. His homework involves finding different ways, or "number sentences," to write five, such as "3+2=5."
It appears that yet again, I too have homework tonight. In the cab, I ask if Ned knows of any ways to write 5, and he holds up four fingers on one hand and one on the other. "Four plus one is five," he says.
Though first grade is getting smoother as the light again hangs around until, well, 5, school has been hard for Ned this year. His progress has been undeniable but slow in writing, and he finds it a stumble to sound out the letters of words. In a typical exercise, I might tell him the next word of the sentence he's trying to write. "How do I write (blank)?" he invariably asks. "What's the first letter?" I ask back.
"Awwww!!" Ned sputters.
"Ned, whenever you ask me that, my first question is always going to be the same."
He claims to have written about three books in "worktime," an hour a schoolday devoted to something academic that the first grader wants to do. Ned says that soon he's going to give the books to me to give to my boss, for editing. After that, Ned is going to sell the copies for $2 ($1 for family members).
Over Christmas break, Ned/all of us had what Ned/all of us came to call a "killer" homework project involving some aspect of Charlotte's Web. Out of a variety of what I thought complex ideas, Ned selected doing a scene from the book using little cardboard figurines. He worked on it a few hours a night after about three evenings of vacation had passed, and as an author I assured him that the only way to tackle a sprawling project was a few hours at a time.
The killer began to fray him. One evening, Ned demanded to know why I'd thrown out a big cardboard box a few days before, as he needed it to build Fern and Wilbur. Then he went on about the pinata he was going to build for his imminent 6th birthday party. "I need newspaper and regular paper," he proclaimed in the tone of the overworked, "and cardboard which I don't have because you threw it out!"
"Talk to mommy about this project," I say. "She's right on top of it. And before you need any of that stuff tonight, you need to do your math homework."
Ned is not angry most homework nights. He is, of course, distracted. In this sense I think he's learning a great deal about being an office worker someday. "Ned, do your math homework before your cookies. It shouldn't take you long."
Math seems okay for Ned, though I do have to keep remembering to say "take away" instead of "minus" when helping him with subtraction. Last time I had to say "take away" instead of "minus" over math, Nixon hadn't yet run for a second term. Ned also still uses props to count. "I need your fingers," he'll say to me when the sum is 12 or higher. Jill uses Legos to help him count. I like to think that the dice I bought Ned in Vegas have helped, too, in addition to teaching him to spell such words as "natural" and "boxcars."
As I'm singing Alex to sleep one night, Ned - who's again running late on his homework - comes in to the bedroom and roots in the Lego box. "I'm on the road again," he says. I have idea what he means, and I sense that before I know it I'll have no idea how to do Ned's homework, either. The other night, for instance, our 15-year-old babysitter brought his homework along to do after the boys had gone to sleep, and he was asking me what a "convex polygon" was. I had an idea, an idea about as clear as the ones that netted me a C in high school algebra.
Number sentences I can handle. I get Ned revved one night by showing him that 6+6=12, 6+7=13, 6+8=14, and so on. "Notice how the number after the 6 keeps going up by one each time, Ned? And what happens to the total number each time, too?" He got all the way to 6+17=23, which thrilled him, and which I know that many adults couldn't figure out without using my fingers.
Once or twice he's stayed excited about math past bedtime. "It's time for bed, Ned ..."
"Awwww!!"
"You can do math problems tomorrow before you go to school," I promise, "if you're good!" (February 2007)
On parent conference night, I squeeze my butt onto a miniscule chair in a room festooned with learning, and it seems quickly obvious that Ned is one his teacher's favorites. She says he often wants to do several things at once, seems to love to learn, is right on target for his grade and age on most aspects of language and math. He has filled almost half a ream with stories and little books and writing exercises. "He's such a joy," his teacher says. "He always explains his thinking." In fact, his teacher seems to be kind of hurrying this conference along to get to the parents of troublesome students when she says, "Ned already thinks of himself as a writer!"
She says he has to concentrate on re-reading, as latter portions of his Batman epics duplicate what happened in the beginning. (Some writers get paid a lot of money and write like that, I think.) He also has to work on properly making capital and lowercase letters. But Ned already thinks of himself as a writer. Oh Jesus no! How am I supposed to support this kid until I'm about 78? After the conference, Ned and I go down to the Scholastic book sale in the school lobby and buy him an $8 set of model skulls. Many of these lie scattered about the desert of publishing, Ned, I feel like telling him.
I don't want to stomp a young fire that I've felt for a long time, no matter how fleeting it might be in Ned, but I do realize one reason he's gone this route. What I say to him often boomerangs back when I don't expect it, such as when during the conference when he lugs in an aircraft carrier and a tugboat he built with a classmate out of cardboard boxes and plastic soda bottles. "These are the submarines!" Ned exclaims to me, pointing to the bottles fixed to the back of the carrier with masking tape. Last May, Ned and I visited the Intrepid, the World War II carrier until recently a floating museum on Manhattan's west side. On that visit, they told Ned he wasn't yet old enough to go on the submarine that was also part of the museum. And last fall they used a tugboat to tow the Intrepid away for refit. Boomeranging.
"How much is Alex's book? The footprint book?" Ned has asked. I tell him $23.50. "Who decided how much the book should be?" he asks. I tell him that is an excellent question. I pause a moment, then tell him again that it is an excellent question, surest sign that a parent doesn't know the answer. Later, I learn Ned has settled on a $2 cover price for his Batman story, half-price for family members. He always explains his thinking.
"What are you looking at?" Ned asked as we walked past a bookstore. I told him I was looking to see if they had Alex's book. "The footprint book? Soon you'll be looking to see if they'll have my book." Alex the Boy, the second book, will be, if published, dedicated to Ned. And he compares every book, at least in thickness, to "his book." "You write more than that, dad! Your book is thicker than that, dad! Is my book that thick?" Does he mean Alex the Boy or Batman?
Ned likes to proclaim he has a reading difficulty, and I sure know society doesn't need another writer who hates to read. Ned has also said, from time to time, that he also wants to be a scuba diver, or maybe a chef. "You could be a scuba diver who cooks on the boat and then writes about it," Jill suggests. Sounds good, as either of the first two could get me off the hook well before 78.
Ah Ned, think about it. The rejection (first word everyone thinks of when somebody says they want to be a writer), the hours alone in a room, the bounced checks, the heartbreak and pain, the editors, the tiny checks, more editors, the ceaseless hustle that makes you sometimes feel you'll bust. But then, Ned, if you are serious about this, a story will find you, and you'll think yourself ready. If you're lucky and if you give the work just the right amount of thought, the words that you put there, right there for good, will shine enough for people to follow them back to you. People who still themselves shine in your past, and the words will have brought you the gift of maybe a second shot at their friendship.
Then there are the people you will always have wanted around when the words began to shine a little. "This is a good book, Jeff," Jill said one night, re-reading the footprints. Twenty-three fifty, indeed. (March 2007)
"'Dogfight' is a light version of WWI air combat. The Germans and Americans each get six biplanes divided into two squadrons of three planes each. Each squadron gets a hand of combat maneuver cards, and players move one plane from each squadron engaging and evading each other. For each plane shot down, you receive an ace token that entitles you to hold a larger hand of cards. Anti-aircraft guns guard each home squadron, and the lucky flyer has the opportunity to strafe the enemy's planes on the ground." - From the really cool site www.dogfightgame.com
One hundred and sixteen squares. Six little plastic planes, moved by dice. One 45-year-old, and one 6-year-old.
"The deck has only two 'Loop' cards, Ned, so be careful you don't leave the tail of your plane exposed if you don't have a 'Loop' card. Don't show me your cards, Ned!" He folds them against his chest, crinkling them! They haven't made these things since the 45-year-old here was a very little boy.
If you're attacked from the side, I explain to Ned, play a "Barrel Roll" card. If you're attacked head-on, play your highest burst card. We start slow, just using two planes a side and a few cards. I help Ned pick the cards, position the planes for his next move ("You can't move that way, Ned; when you ended your last turn, you left your plane pointing the other way ..."), and learn such tricks as putting the tail of your airborne plane against the edge of the playing board when you haven't drawn any "Loop" cards, to prevent the enemy from attacking from behind.
I know this game. I played "Dogfight" with my older brother Lee when I was a kid. When he grew away from getting his ass kicked over the Western Front, I invented a solitaire version, and even - as time ticked disturbingly into my teen years - imagined and documented careers of fictitious pilots on both sides who lived and died like meteors. World War I pilots carried no parachutes, but they fought in a time of honor, when victors saluted the vanquished just before the latter smashed into the ground.
The game is part of the American Heritage series largely of the 1960s, and the series included "Skirmish" (little plastic Redcoat soldiers), "Broadside" (little sailing ships), "Hit the Beach!" (little destroyers and bombers), and "Battle Cry" (little Civil War guys). "Dogfight's" board is a lavish depiction of a battlefield, from the warbird's-eye view of the hangers and the field hospitals, up towards the artillery nearer the trenches, to the brown strip down the center of the board that's lined with trenches and dotted with what are supposed to be the foot soldiers' helmets. On each side of the board is a little drawing of a crashed warplane.
I believe only "Dogfight" is in the Smithsonian. It is also on ebay (starting at, incredibly, only about $10), along with its replacement parts. "Ned, don't bend that!"
I was unsure when to start Ned on the Big DF. The biplanes and the stands they sit on during play are fragile -- plastic may not biodegrade, but it doesn't stand up to kids well, either. I try not to snap at him when Ned drops one of the tiny green disks used to designate the German aces, or when he pulls his playing card from the wrong deck.
He does pretty well in the warm-up games. I hope he likes this; we've kind of drifted away from model-building after the ships of "Star Trek," a show I watched in syndication as a kid but which now isn't on anymore. Syndication isn't what it used to be.
"Ned, would you like to try a real game?"
I write to the doctor who oversees dogfightgame.com, telling him that I have introduced Ned to the game. "I'm pleased you enjoyed the site," the doctor wrote back, "and that Ned already has his head in the clouds. Happy gaming!"
Ned has a lot to learn. He shows his cards accidentally. He challenges my anti-aircraft batteries recklessly, and sometimes without even attacking my defenseless airfields once he manages to get through the guns. He plays carelessly.
He beats me two out of three games. "Ned, how many 'Loop' cards do you have, anyway?!"
Ned's a lucky flyer. He does a little chair dance. He must learn to salute the vanquished. (May 2007)
An e-mail comes back from my brother Lee, who's been a fisherman longer than I've been a "Star Trek" fan: "I got your call, but we were completely bombed at the store so I couldn't answer. Great news about Ned and his obviously inherited talent for fishing. It's always gratifying when I hear of a kid's success and their discovery of the outdoors. Fishing with dad and the fish are biting - can't beat that."
I wasn't exactly with Ned at that moment a few days before, at grandpa's lake house on Memorial Day. I was chasing Alex, who'd run into a neighbor's lake house - long story - when I heard Ned down at the dock yelling up through the bamboo, "Dad dad dad!" What tree was he snagged on now?
I got to the dock, and at the end of Ned's sagging old fishing rod I saw what must have been a 10-inch bass. At least I think it was a bass.
Well, I had warmed up the lake for Ned, as a few minutes before Alex darted for the neighbor's I'd landed a crappy - at least I think it was a crappy. I'd seen the fish strike in the shallows, going for one of the lures that Uncle Lee sent Ned for his sixth birthday last winter. I hauled in the crappy, who was maybe a respectable five inches and with a dot of red and blue near his gill. "Gross," said Aunt Julie. "Throw him back. Why don't you go fishing in the ocean?" I threw him back.
Ned's bass was about as thick in the middle as a bottle of steak sauce, gold and brown, with one wet bullet of an eye staring up from the bottom of the creel that Uncle Lee also sent to Ned for his last birthday. Uncle Lee and Ned are the only people I've ever known who owned creels.
Ned and I look at the gold and brown gills rise and fall. "Well Ned," I say, "you could let him go. You can just maybe catch him later in the summer."
Silence.
"You could let him go. It's your call."
Ned keeps watching the gills. "He's my first fish," Ned says at last. "He means a lot to me." I tell Ned that it's his call completely, but again I say that he could let the fish go. Ned doesn't budge.
I guess it's a bass; I guess it's edible. Who's going to clean it? Last time I cleaned a fish, I had an Algebra II quiz the next day. "Look up cleaning bass online," I tell Jill back at the house.
"You're going on the grill, buddy," Ned says.
If Ned hadn't been a 6-year-old boy from Manhattan, he might at that moment have been a 54-year-old co-owner of a furniture store in Bangor, Maine. All through my childhood, my brother would vanish every spring and summer weekend morning with a tackle box and a barbecue chicken in a "CAUTION: HOT!" bag, and return hours later with a jingling string of gold-and-brown buddies on a chain. Lee took me fishing when I was five, when I caught a sunfish off a bridge. He took me fishing when I was 14, when I caught a sunburn in a canoe. He taught me how to clean a fish.
Uncle Rob, at the lake house, snaps a photo with his phone, then I ask Ned to join me in the cleaning, figuring he should see what happens before the grill. The gills are still rising and falling, though more slowly, in the bottom of the creel, so I lift the bass out and slap his head twice and hard against a rock. Let's see, get the head off. Twist. Toss it in the shallows, then cut off and toss the tail. Slit the length of the fish. Ned watches as I slosh what looks like lemon pudding out of the innards. Just like years ago, before that quiz, the fish's spine is still the bitch.
Ned gets a few mouthfuls of white, grilled bass beside his lunchtime steak. Later that afternoon, back on the dock, we have no further luck, though I can see the head in the shallows.
By the Tuesday after Memorial Day, the photo is zipping over the Net; one of its destinations is Uncle Lee. "Ned has talent!" he e-mails back. "Little fish lore for you. Hold the subject a bit higher, wear light solid colors so it shows up better, and, above all else, hold the subject out at arm's length as far as possible. This of course is absolutely crucial in the fish appearing LARGER than it actually is. This is legal, and expected of any self-respecting fisherman." Next time, Ned will know. (June 2007)
For the first time in his life and ours, Ned slept somewhere else without one of us. It was at summer daycamp, a one-time overnight outing that promised a campfire, a moonlit walk in the woods, the thrills of the ghost story and of sliding into his sleeping bag after 12 straight hours in the outdoors.
"They specifically said at the orientation that they provide sleeping bags!" I inform Jill, who like me has just been informed that they don't provide sleeping bags and that Ned -- who doesn't have one -- will have to bring one.
"Well how could they?" she replies. "Think of lice and stuff like that." So our night before The Night of One Child Home (that would be Alex, and it'll be the first time for him too since late 2000) started with Jill rapping out an e-mail to the building list to see if anyone had a sleeping bag.
Ned had not only never been away without us overnight before, he'd never been away overnight without us in the woods. His overnight was Thursday. His bus pulled up to the curb right on time early Friday evening, and he crawled off looking like he'd spent a week on Guadalcanal: his jeans muddy cuffs to belt loops, his eyes red slits. His T shirt was inside out, the same T shirt he'd left wearing on Thursday morning.
"Mommy," he asked immediately, "is the Milk Lady real?"
Ned conferred with Jill by the rear of the bus while waiting for Alex's turtle suitcase, which he'd borrowed, and the neighbor's pricey down sleeping bag, which I was glad to see returned, unlike much Ned has lugged to camp this summer. We went to what has become our regular Friday night pizza place to de-brief. Jill poured Ned a few drops of Merlot in a lot of water. Ned immediately looked through the glass. "It's a red-wine world!" he exclaimed.
His major activities overnight included dinner, something I think was called "The Dead Ant" game, something I think was called "The Nice Course Game," a night hike, bed, and breakfast the next morning. "The night hike wasn't that good, but the food is good," Ned assures me. "Spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. Pancakes and bacon for breakfast." Jill asks how many pieces of bacon they gave him. "Just two," he says.
I ask Ned about the something I think is called the Dead Ant game, which I believe is played to music and may be like Musical Chairs. "First you dance around something something with if you get three people, say 'Hoop,' then you get five people." When Ned relates how the counselor said, "Stop the music!" Ned gets a faraway look his eye, as if remembering a good Merlot in Paris during the war.
In the Nice Course Game, "You have two jump ropes, you crab walk to another something something, hoop five times, then you kick a soccer ball, then you come back." Oh. Did you have any trouble going to sleep, Ned? He waves away that notion with one hand. Did he think just for a minute that he was home when he woke up in the morning? "No," he answers, smiling, "because I was in a sleeping bag!"
"I told you before you went to camp that every scary story you were going to be told was untrue and that you shouldn't be scared. The Milk Lady is just somebody with white hair," explains Jill. Yeah, somebody who kills children.
The night hike also let him down. "We didn't see anything, just sticks," says Ned.
"He said a lot of bad things happened," Jill eventually reported. "He said he saw a bear."
"I was kind of making a joke," Ned replied later. "But dad, when I was waiting a took a big dirt rock and threw it against a tree and it went sphrew! I pretended acorns were hitting me in the head. I didn't," Ned concludes, "have any fun at all." He takes another sip from his red-wine world. (July 2007)
Like it was my fault that Ned left his double-ace's ass in front of my machine guns in our latest game of Dogfight.
I'd done everything I could as a self-respecting member of the Imperial German Army Air Service (Luftstreitkräfte) who'd jumped out to a three-plane in the game, even to the point of sacrificing one of my aces to teach Ned how to let his two airborne fighters work as a team.
In Dogfight, a "Loop" is the card you play when an opponent's plane attacks one of your planes from behind. There are only two "Loop" cards in each squadron's deck. Each player has two "squadrons" each of three little plastic biplanes. One side (German) has red biplanes, the other (American) green, just like in World War I ("Almost a hundred years ago!" I say to Ned, to which he replies, "WHAT!?"). The planes move according to rolls of the dice, and players engage with cards of attack ("bursts") or defense ("loop," "barrel roll").
Ned has won four games in a row since I taught him to play Dogfight last winter. And I'm no slouch. I played Dogfight as a child, and have longed to play it again.
When we sat down to play this time, Ned did a little chair dance. "I'm gonna whip your butt! I'm gonna whip your butt!" he chanted, sounding a lot like the leaders of France, Germany, England, Austria, and Russia in August of 1914. I knew I shouldn't let Ned get away with saying "butt" or maybe even "whip," but other lessons were in store for this day.
Ned is getting excellent at moving his planes around the board and using them to attack individually, but in this game his dice rolls consistently stranded his planes a spot of two away from the best positions. I used this match-up to teach him a little about having his planes work together and protect each other's weak sides (depending on what defense cards are in each plane's deck), and moving the two planes as a team to the best parts of the board. But in this game he'd lost three planes to my one, and he squirmed and groaned a little louder over each shoot down.
Even as I slid the tiny red Fokker towards the tail of Ned's double-ace, I wondered, "Should I do this?" He's obviously capable of playing this game and winning - in none of his four wins did I hold back - and you know, sometimes bad stuff just happens in back of us all.
Ned's ace went down; he cast his cards across the board. "You didn't deal me any 'Loop' cards!" he cried. Then he was crying for real on this long, rainy Sunday afternoon and slamming himself into the broom closet door out in the kitchen.
"Ned, come back here."
Slam slam slam.
"Ned, come back here now or I'm picking up the game!"
I refuse to raise a kid who's only happy when chanting about kicking butt, who can't understand early that 4 and 1 is a pretty good record for a 6-year-old against a guy who was playing Dogfight when the First World War was little more than 50 years in the past.
I slowly pick up the cards and carefully wrap the rubber bands around them. I drop the dice and planes in the box, and fold up the board. "Noooo!" Ned cries.
"Ned, we will play another time. We'll call it a draw."
A few moments go by. Ned calms down, and I ask him to sit on the couch with me. I ask him if he thinks he should be punished for the way he reacted. He slowly nods. "No," I respond, "it's not a matter of being punished. It's a matter of learning a big lesson."
"But you didn't deal me any 'Loop' cards!"
Well, if you're going to teach your kid, speak plain. "Ned, it's all up to chance, like rolling the dice," I say. "When I shuffle the deck, I don't plan what cards come up on top. Ned, sometimes life doesn't deal you any 'Loop' cards." This is true and clear, and I'm proud of having said it to him.
We all find something else to do until mercifully it's bath time on Sunday night, and everybody has to get ready to go back into the world on Monday morning. Just once more to the subject, though. I ask Ned when he's in the tub how he'd react if he had it to go through again. "It'd be okay," he says.
And if you're winning? Do you do a chair dance?
"Just go 'Yes!' once," he says, pretending to pull his arm to his side in quick celebration, "and then let it go." (August 2007)
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