Meyers Briggsing the 4 Year Old?

Bedtime currently is a complicated affair. The Lad's fascination with forts has regularly left Mum or Dad tearing themselves away from reading the epic dinosaur-trucks constructing a swimming pool tale to ask, "Are you paying attention?"  Over the course of 3 or 4 weeks of this, we have yet to get a response that indicates comprehension or attentiveness.  Worse still is the fact that his insistence on using every pillow in the house for his forts leaves Mum and I trying to figure out what combination of pillows we have been bequeathed with as he snores the night away on a pile of about a half dozen pillows of all sizes.

He has insisted on the pillow forts at his grandparents as well and can get in a pretty cranky mood after a fort collapse, despite the flimsy materials of down pillows and blankets that he resorts to for his construction.  Is this a phase?  Time will tell.

Lego and jigsaw puzzles fill more and more of his day, not to mention the living room and bedroom floors.  There is one 45-piece puzzle that he has put together and immediately taken apart to reassemble that elements of the pieces - big chunky pieces for a toddler - are breaking apart and the finished work is best described as gap-toothed.  He has moved on to puzzles with more pieces and they pose a little more challenge, if only because the individual pieces aren't cut in a manner that accommodates a better fit.  These are the first thing he wants to do in the morning and it would be easy for him to distract himself (and us) from dinner to work on a puzzle that he started in the morning before breakfast.

After building some pretty complex Lego sets on his own, he has taken to coming up with his own Lego creations that do not follow any instructions and helping him in the task is something that is challenging for me.  My recollections of my Lego peak involved me carefully drafting floor plans while putting together houses with good circulation and plenty of windows for each room in the house.  When Gabriel asks me to help him build a house, however, things are more spontaneous.  He occasionally gives me direction getting the walls up as high as possible.  In return, he would resist my suggestions to install windows somewhere, anywhere in his edifice.  We would settle into a rhythm of building the walls higher and higher, ensuring that we don't run into each other or get too ahead of one another.

I am cautious to ensure the bricks overlap for stability and strength, but I have let go of my desire to have the building be one colour.  When it came time for building a roof on our most recent group effort, though, he let me construct layers of the overlapping flat pieces to close in toward the center in an efficient light cover on his building.

While he has demonstrated some aptitude for music at times, it has been (slightly) less frequent of late.  The most recent was him singing the non-throat-shredding parts of the Foo Fighters "These Days" a month and a half ago.  At the moment, the building and puzzles have been his main preoccupation with the exception of Star Wars but that is another story or seven.  I recall a Mi' Kmaq gentleman telling Nadine during Month 6 of the pregnancy that Gabriel was going to be a lawyer, but it may be that the current phase is a sign of an engineering aptitude that his uncles would embrace.  It is far too early to tell much of anything.

The Acrophobe's Son

My own issue with heights can be traced to the nefarious influence of Looney Tunes cartoons.  I was walking up the stairs in our home as a 3- or 4-year-old and tried to climb them in the same way that Tweety Bird - lacking my length of limb - made use of both arms (ahem wings) and feet to scramble onto each individual step.  After succeeding on enough steps to get near the top, I shed whatever vigilance it took to keep all four limbs strategically placed on a step and... down the whole flight I rolled.  I don't believe I sobbed or anything that brought attention to my Chuck Jones influenced effort. I just swallowed my pride and walked up the steps upright, with a new fear firmly embedded and a dollop of playfulness gone.

Since that time, the legs quake at certain precipices, oblivious to the minor feats of engineering that will undoubtedly assure my safety - as I have often been told. I have kept my feet away from trapdoors in the floors of cable cars. I have steered clear of the view from skyscraper windows. I white-knuckled through a flight in my uncle's float plane Cessna in 1984 and gulped watermelon-down-the-throat-hard when he released the controls and told me to take over as the plane dipped.

If one needs evidence that opposites attract, exhibit A would be my wife: mountain girl. Born and raised in the Rocky vistas of Canmore, Alberta, she has had a long affinity for the mountains and her own long, unscarring history of rock-climbing - both indoors and out.  Gabriel has often demonstrated his mother's indifference to heights while I on a regular basis white knuckle from a distance at his forays up monkey bars or the other apparatus that catch his eye at the playground.

For the last month, he has been able to up the ante with participation in a more structured rock-climbing class.  He had been a little skittish about the climbing great heights during the first few weeks, rarely climbing any higher than two or three metres off the ground.  Each session my wife and I would watch as he climbed about two metres up the wall and called out, "Down." We would talk to the class instructor and she assured us that he was making progress. Gabriel would assure us that he was not afraid of heights and last week he boasted that he made it to the very top of the wall - an assertion of pride that went unchallenged despite the evidence to the contrary.

We had resigned ourselves to not signing him up for another class given his reluctance to get too far from solid ground but on the last night of the class he made steady progress up the wall.  My concerns that my anxieties were being transmitted to him finally abated and I applauded and fist-pumped to him as he beamed up from the floor after his belay to solid ground.  Meanwhile, my legs quaked as the waifs scrambled up and down the walls.  I had seen enough and I retired to a chair in the hallway and buried my nose in a book.

A Message

On Saturday morning, I was sitting at my desk, tapping away at the computer when Gabriel came in, clutching a teddy bear and alert despite just getting up.  He looked at me in a way that was vaguely reminiscent and then he gave a small tug at the hair on my right wrist that was familiar, though he had never done it ever before.

That moment, with the tug on the hair, me at the desk, the precise distance between us and the angle of eye contact still haunts me two and a half days later.  Gabriel's gesture, for it is more gesture than action to me, took me back 25 years to another occasion when I sat at a desk, my hirsute arms evoking curiosity in a young boy.  He is a boy who has been in my thoughts throughout the 25 years that have passed.  For a time, I pondered naming Gabriel after this boy, but with the reviews in, it seems we did a decent job of choosing the name that we did.

The boy's name was Marcusi.  With my son, I might have dropped the terminal "i" or made it a middle name, but the time for that musing has passed.  Marcusi was the lone boy in the first class I taught when I began my teaching career in 1991.  He was the youngest in the class and we bonded over hockey in particular but recollections of him evoke memories of him visiting my home for soup and Oreos, the boundless energy with which he brought the milk to everyone's desk, the way he played Ebeneezer Scrooge during our second Christmas concert together and the insistence with which he protected me.  A wealth of fond memories for a teacher after two years in the classroom. Outside the classroom, I recall the unbelievable, fortuitous opportunity to take him out for dinner to a sports bar in Montreal where he marvelled at the array of televisions that ensured he had every chance to keep his eyes on the game between the Penguins and Blackhawks in 1992. His curiosity about the lemon wedge in my Coke earned him a wedge for his water and one of my indulgent smiles.

But the memory of Marcusi's tug on the wrist might be pre-eminent among my memories for its intimacy and boyish wonder.  When Gabriel did the same, it brought so much of that time back to me that it has been overwhelming. Perhaps there is some vague universal in that act or gesture - that a plurality of boys have that habit of pulling wrist hair - but it has ineffably connected Gabriel and Marcusi.  When I think of the angles as our eyes met, I am certain that my chair heights then and now were such that I met Gabriel's eyes at the same angle that I met Marcusi's nearly 25 years ago.  When I consider the Inuit belief that a name is handed down because of the belief that an ancestor's spirit is embodied or reincarnated in the child, I get spooked by the common gesture.

Marcusi is no longer with us.  He would be 35 if he were but he took his life in September 2001, just as he turned 21. There were issues even when I. Was teaching him when he started abusing solvents because of bullying.  I managed to stop for a while and he even graduated from high school - no small feat for an Inuk.  There are time when I wonder if there was more I could have done, especially having taught during those formative years but there was only so much impact I could have in the course of the years that followed my departure from his village when he was twelve. He even kept in touch by letter while I was in Japan.  A teenaged boy writing letters? Mailing them halfway around the world? You would readily acknowledge that he's rare, but I'll tell you he was special.

For me, the repetition of that gesture was so many things all at once - cautionary, spooky, puzzling, spectral and reassuring - and a harbinger of second chances.  It is a reminder of how fragile and fleeting childhood and innocence can be.  I will need to be vigilant about the things that will challenge Gabriel in the years ahead and I will need an internal strength to prepare him and to face them with him.  If there's something mystical or spiritual at play in this echoed gesture as well, then I take from it the message that the too-brief dry run with Marcusi was a gift and that there is a lot of him in the boy I had half a mind to name after him.