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By JONATHAN GIBBS
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Once or twice a week after deadline and the paper is put to bed (which I guess means it’s laid down onto its deathbed) my son and I get in my truck and go an adventure around town in a search to combine work (mine) with pleasure (his). Last week we went into the office, and there in front of the reception desk was a blonde, blue-eyed girl about his size (38 inches) and age (3). As soon as I set him down, he walked in as straight a line as a toddler can walk, looked the girl in the eye and without preamble, announced pleasantly, “My name’s Nathan.”
Getting no immediate response as the girl moved closer to her mother while looking to her for guidance, threw down his trump cards – a paired suit of hearts – vulnerability tied to trust: “I live on Hawthorne Ave.” Her continued indifference left him nonplussed, and in those two acts I saw how much more mentally healthy a post-toddler can be than an adult. It made me ponder what happens in the intervening years between childhood and adulthood to complicate and entangle our human emotions so wretchedly that we end up erecting blast barriers around our hearts.
I still struggle with the truism that it’s none of my business what other people think of me. I can be in a crowded room with 40 people all of whom are fully engaged in a deafening, boisterous chant exclaiming my continued greatness in all things, yet if there’s one person in another house, half a block away in a closed bathroom with the fan running and the radio blaring, and he happens to mutter, “What a dope that Gibbs guy jerk is,” that’s the voice to which I’m listening.
Nathan, however, took this young girl’s refusal to talk to him for what it was: none of his business. “She’s a little shy,” he explained as they left. As he goes through life, such refusals get meaner and he’ll end up being called things that aren’t listed on his birth certificate. If he continues to apply the same reaction as he did at my office last week, he’ll save himself a bowlful of hurt at the banquet table of life.
Shortly thereafter, Nathan and went to the park, telling our office manager I was “going to kill two birds with one stone” by letting him play while I took photos for the paper. Little did I know that would turn out to be an unfortunately prescient offhand remark.
We pulled into Barbara Tufts Memorial Park, hard off the Greenwich Bay and upwind of the town’s wastewater treatment plant, producer of the perfume we named Eau de Sewáge as we got out of the car. It was cold but sunny, with puffy, flat-bottomed clouds moving across a blue sky like sheep toward a distant sweater factory. The weather conditions were superfluous to Nathan, however, as he took off for the playground’s construction digger like a binge eater spotting a pasta buffet.
Hopping onto the seat, Nathan reached for the controls. The metal grips on the digger’s arms were cold, so he adjusted the sleeves of his parka so he could grasp them with his hands protected. He played with the controls, getting off and on the seat with fixed determination, exclaiming, “I have an awful lot of things to do.” He alternated between construction projects in the cinder pile and trips inside a nearby enclosure underneath the slide. He’d climb inside and then turn around and lean back over the bar to tell me he had made an ice cream cone for me. It literally made my heart elevate in my chest as I watched my son playing with such unfettered, uncomplicated delight, living completely in the moment. How can I help him retain this ability to live, play and share (even if it is pretend ice cream) so joyously?
After about three rounds of following him between these activities as he ran to and fro, my eye caught movement across the cove shore. Two humanoid-shaped figures were moving from left to right (north to south) and there was something stalkingly predatory, almost military about their movement that snapped my eyes to attention and made me study them closer. Squinting, I saw they were boys, somewhere in their preteens, and that the objects of their daylight creep was a pair of Mute swans, who were in the water about 10 feet from shore with their backs to them. (Not that could have warned each other, being mute and all.) The boys were determined to perform the caveman dance with these two birds but they were having trouble coordinating their actions and it was obvious their shallow supply of patience was running dry. Finally, one made a charge and threw the rock he held hostage in his right hand at the closest bird.
The results were predictable (high and wild outside), but the incident gave me pause. First of all, not being without sin myself, I didn’t feel as if I should have been the one throwing the first stone, but beyond that I have a hard time imagining my son performing similar cruelties. Nathan will reach an age where innocence and unbounded kindness will be challenged by a complex mix of peer pressure, a search for self and that confused sort of measurement of who he thinks he is inside with who he thinks others are by looking at their outsides. The portrayal of young boys as wholly capable of great meanness is a stereotype because there’s truth in it. The stories of training magnifying glasses on ants are told because it happens. And while it is true that there is usually an instigator, one more drawn toward expressing anger by destroying things, what, I began to wonder, can I do to help Nathan from being drawn in to these acts of cruelty?
In the spirit of disclosure, my best friend, who we’ll call Timmy Beeble because no one can make up a name like that, and I took some turns down Cruelty Way during adolescence. His attic, where his bedroom was, had a settled population of Houseflies (Musca domestica) that went through their generational paces in the corners and left their black fly spit all over the windows, which fed our gross-out appetite immensely. Sometimes their birthing, eating and mating paces intersected with our boredom when we fell idle. It is a fact of human societal nature that when creative competition meets on a playing field in which the third party is helpless and overmatched, the results can be particularly loathsome and foul. The idea of frying flies a la ant was too bland and unimaginative for two budding Torquemada’s, and so we resorted to more monstrously contemptible means of showing these flies who was boss. First rendered them immobile with a blast of Timmy’s mom’s hairspray. Then, using the tools at hand, we used her cuticle scissors to clip off their tiny inert legs. Then we rinsed the sticky hairspray off them with a plastic spray bottle of water and waited for them to dry off and take flight.
Fly, they did. The thing they could not do was land; or at least they couldn’t land and then stop. They’d fly at the window, then buzz helplessly and fall. They’d try to come to rest on Timmy’s desk and bounce off like a badly-flown plane on an aircraft carrier. We made the appropriate sports calls we heard from the TV announcers: “Freddy the Fly is about to touch down, folks . . . Ohhh, no! That had to hurt.”
Eventually we got bored and stopped our experiments in flight/not flight with flies. We moved on to other boy things like forming neighborhood boy clubs where we solidified our common purpose and strength as member of the Rockwell Avenue Rejects by doing things Scott Worthington read in a pirate book. One of them was drink blood from a rusty can. We didn’t know any unfortunate sailors or wenches to acquire blood from, or even if we did, we didn’t want to get in trouble with our mommies and daddies. So we stole some hamburger from Timmy’s refrigerator and squeezed the juice into a pretty rusty, or at least somewhat tarnished, can and drank that. We then threatened to show ou dominance of the adjacent neighborhoods by having a rock fight with the Park Avenue Boys. Luckily for them, it started to get dark, so we drifted off to our respective suburban homes.
Do I see my son now, smiling ear to ear as he offers me “a waffle and an ice cream surprise” as capable of such mischief? Not exactly, but I also block the sight of the swan stalkers from his line of vision. The boys miss with a couple more throws and the birds swim off, there won’t be a swan song set to a rock beat this afternoon, but I just got a glimpse of the complexity of raising a boy.
We race each other back to the car.
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