No, Not Yet

A twelve-year-old is singing along with "Title and Registration" by Death Cab for Cutie:

...where disappointment and regret collide
Lying awake at night...

"Do you have regrets, Agent 97?"

"No."

Ah!

great deleted scenes, oracular arts and crafts, anniversary price tag

1. Finally watching a movie you’ve been putting off mistrustfully, and loving it so much you watch all the special features and deleted scenes.

2. Attending a show of crafts the kids made in summer camp: seeing the life they live when you’re not there, the aptitudes they didn’t know they had last month, the memories they’ll have fifty years from now, the roads they’ll go on their own.

3. Unplanned anniversary celebration with a former love: no gifts, no flowers, much laughter and free-hearted talk.

It's a Wise Child

Whenever possible I pour drops of paternal wisdom into my children’s ear canals. This time I bought Agent 97 a copy of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens. Skimming it, I thought that many of its lessons would be useful for adults too, one of the good ones in the series rather than the useless pablum.

97 reads down the table of contents and responds to the chapter titles:

“’Don’t Throw Up on Your Friends!’ I wasn’t going to.

“’Don’t Sweat the Breakups’ I don’t have a girlfriend.

“’Practice Mental Aikido.’” (Snorts, doesn’t deign to reply.)

“’Avoid the Words “I Know” When Someone Is Talking”’ I already know that.

“’Check Out These Odds! (The Likelihood that Everyone Will Like You)’. Everyone does like me.

“’Get Out of the Emergency Lane.’ I don’t drive.

“’Be OK With Your Bad Hair Day.’ Every day is a bad hair day for me.”

I think he’s got it!

The Nanny Problem

A little blond-haired boy, a toddler, is riding in a shopping cart facing his nanny, a young Japanese woman who is -- I cannot adequately convey this -- who is so beautiful that the peaches in the produce bin start leaking when she stops to consider them.

(Am I the only one who notices? Have miracles become so commonplace? The other shoppers are older women, they’re not going to give her an extra glance, and the two guys stacking endive in the corner are discussing the imminent arrival of a shipment of Holland tomatoes. This is a fancy store.)

She’s tall and slim in a cream-colored silk blouse with the cuffs folded above her wrists; two extraordinarily fortunate gold bracelets dangle on the left wrist knob. Ivory skin draws her eyelids tight toward wide cheekbones, and her black hair sweeps above one ear and down to the other shoulder. Utamaro would have made a famous series of prints of her.

The blond-haired boy, drinking milk from a sippie cup, looks right and left at this excellent world, but always his gaze returns to the center, to her. His clean white sneakers, bobbing, kick her softly in the tummy. She doesn’t object but doesn’t encourage. She’s absorbed in her employer’s shopping list. She’s attentive to the boy, she answers his two-syllable questions and offers him a sweet cracker from a box in her handbag, but she doesn’t baby-talk or burble or dandle.

With a calm smile she takes a delft-blue washcloth from the bag and wipes a tear-streak of milk from his chin. He grabs for it, and looks at it with wonder because she has touched it.

The poor little guy. He’s going to spend his whole life searching for her, and he’ll never see her like again.

Watching her push the cart to the checkout in her long flared cocoa-brown pants, I say to myself, “I want a nanny.”

It's Okay to Read Stories

I'm sitting on a bench in an empty outdoor amphitheater, reading my current favorite novelist, J. G. Farrell, when from behind me comes an exclamation:

"No, that's a bad choice!"

I turn around: it's a boy of about eleven or twelve reading a paperback of Brave New World. "Oh, God!" he calls out in dismay to the characters.

I'm reassured that there's a point in reading fiction other than to study the craft or keep reality at bay.

They say girls mature faster than boys, but...

On the bus to day camp, the girls sing:

Found a peanut, found a peanut,
Found a peanut just now

and the boys sing:

I lost my virginity to the killer queen