The Walk Home Evolves

From https://www.emuparadise.me/

Before getting into this post, a quick anecdote from a few days ago.

Our heat has been off in our condo as the boiler is being replaced. With the temperatures closer to freezing than we would like there is a little more bundling up.  A few nights back we asked our son if he wanted pyjamas with feet or without feet.

"Yes!", he replied.

We asked again and again -- I could inflate this to 7 repetitions of the question -- and each time he replied, "Yes."

Finally I said, "You know, if you can't answer an A or B question, we might have to hold you back a year."

His response, which I admit I clearly had coming: "You already did!!"

He's 5 now.  Going on 15 in November.

Despite the lad being in school now and rounding out his truncated days in kindergarten ("Oh, when I was a boy...") with sessions at Out of School Care (OOSC), I still have the opportunity to walk him home.

The changes may have been gradual but they are significant and noticeable at this point.  Our walks on the pedestrian overpass that straddles 14th Street are far more amusing now as he essentially turns it into his version of the old video game Frogger.  He pauses strategically before racing over each lane of traffic to avoid getting exploded.  I'm slower to catch on but he assured me on Monday that even though I got exploded I still had two lives left.  (Obviously he is getting exposed to video games somewhere.)  Today he added a variation to the game by telling me that the northbound cars were marshmallows and the southbound bombs. Or was that the southbound were marshmallows.  The strategy has changed and he is less likely to adopt the full on sprint across the overpass to smash himself into the chainlink fence on the other side of the bridge.  He has not, however, developed a clear scoring system.

The conversation has opened up a little more. He still tends to give accounts of the people who contributed to the scrapes and cuts on his knees. This month, however, the stories have been of real conflict over sharing or not sharing and I have taken the opportunity to share with him my simmering observation that one of the hardest things to decide is whether it is better to be patient and tolerate a situation or to impose your will on someone and make them concede to you.  At his age the second scenario may result in a fight, though there may be a chance that will or personality can assert some influence as well.  I told him my tendency has been to be patient, though I have wondered from time to time if that was the best strategy.  Despite my doubts, I told him that I preferred that he be patient and try to talk things through -- the third way that I have yet to get full command of.

A chance encounter with his uncle on our way home today also gave me the opportunity to talk about walking.  His uncle is involved in a conference on walkability here in Calgary this week and after we had a brief chat about the conference, my son and I continued home talking about how much we walk.  I did not bother to trouble him with kids who have to be bussed to school and just reminded him of entire weekends we have gone without using the car.  I pointed out the advantages for his health and safety when there are fewer cars or more time spent walking.  Today, though, I could have added that it is a good opportunity to clear your head at the end of the day.

Again, Again

Music will likely be one of the things that Gabriel and I will always bond over. I know I ought to chase that comic voice bubble out of the frame as I suspect there is a every likelihood the two of us will butt heads in the years ahead as our tastes diverge or his indifference to his guitar gains a critical mass, but when adolescence passes we should be able to pick up the conversation again from when or wherever we leave off. Unlike the Kinsellas in Field of Dreams, we will be more likely to sit down near the stereo or with our guitars than pick up baseball gloves.

Tonight was one of those nights where a song and a musician provided a span of the bridge that will take us through that still-distant stretch of adolescence to whatever conversation there will be when we sit down to share music on the other side.

After nearly a year of listening to an emerging pop-folk master named Paul Johnson, who commercially plies is craftsmanship under the guise of Canyon City, Gabriel was asking to hear, "The one that starts, 'I woke before the sun rose...'" during his bath and asked for it again as I turned him in for the night.  As we went on to listen to said song, titled "Needles and Pins," eleven to twelve times in a row until his breathing finally eased into the rhythm that portended sleep we talked and talked - the lad not merely stalling sleep, but asking questions that would not come from anywhere else.

"What is grace?" and, in response to my attempt to capture it for a 5-year-old, "What is a virtue?"

We lay in the dark exchanging favorite passages of the song. He, the chorus, with its fairy tale mention of plastic crowns and the certainty about where home is; me the more adult world evocations about "wear(ing) a tie to go to work and tell(ing)... lies like everything's okay" and "los(ing) some keys in the dust." With each repetition of the song in the dark, Gabriel's questions continued about the song, the individual words that emerged and caught his ear more easily with each listening and I'm sure there were unasked questions planted there to bloom later about music, craft, poetry and love that he will ask when he has the words in the weeks and years ahead.

I have every confidence that Mr. Johnson/Canyon City will have a wonderful career ahead of him as songs such as "Needles and Pins" continue to find their path to ears and hearts in the days ahead.  If it has not happened already, he will nightly have audience members who will tell him that he wrote their song, whether it is the one they make love to, danced for the first time as husband and wife or any other milestone in life of someone following their romantic path to one-and-onlys that he describes so aptly in song and song again.  In about ten years or so, there will also be a 60-year-old man with his 15-year-old son -- the lad possibly doing a great job of portraying adolescent indifference to anything the old man springs on him or indulging in some patience with me for the night -- and, with a wink, I'll simply say that I used his first album to lull that lad asleep not so long ago.

Thanks Paul.

On Kindergarten Eve

As I write this post, I am contemplating the browser tab for the Google search, "inspecting for lice" and wondering whether I should bookmark it or just leave it open.  I had to do a search last night after a flurry of text messages and a phone call from friends we camped with over the weekend, and it made for a little baptism for mother and father heading into the heart of September.  The flashlight inspection last night, the lack of even a single scratch of the scalp and a good hair wash tonight provide some reassurance that we are all clear.

We hope.

The lad heads on the next stage of the journey tomorrow. Kindergarten is a little more than 13 hours away and I pause to look in all directions.  He will be headed to an old sandstone building still older than the one I started school in in days of yore.  It is not the red clapboard single room school of one stereotype but the creak of the wood floors, the wide-yet-cluttered hallways and tall windows give a sense that this is a school that gives some comforting associations with the word.  With the school being only 400 metres away, there is the chance to see him build some independence in the weeks and months ahead as well.

Today, it was a challenge to give the sense of significance that was appropriate for the occasion of starting school. An afternoon at a trampoline centre, an early bath and a bit of a speech from the old guy (that's me!) was part of the effort to make something of the day, but it is more of a transition for mom and dad than it is for him. New friends, new expectations and perhaps the threat of a little less play than has been the case, but it may be hard for him to identify significant differences between elementary school and day care. There will be lots of new kids and a lot of bigger ones too, but other than that there will be little to overwhelm the boy who so calmly transitioned into day care 30 pounds and 18 inches ago.

There are some questions about how we prepared him, but I try to tell myself that would be the case with any parent. He has an undeniable knack for math and sciences, a mild indifference to art, drawing, and... ahem... printing.  I look ahead to the partnership with his teachers in the years ahead to help us set goals for him and I anticipate the challenges we will all face with some degree of excitement.  I can picture him sitting down at the kitchen table - not necessarily tomorrow night - working on the things that he is struggling with where I can bring something to his growth, but I will dread -- just as I did during junior high school -- the Science Fairs that loom.

Apart from the scholastic aptitudes that are yet to be measured more precisely, there is the boy that we are sending off into the world.  He is an affectionate boy who can be a goofball and enjoys the role of the clown.  There are moments when he can withdraw when he is not getting his way, but there is a chance that he is more sensitive to the needs of others when he is in a big room. From day one we have been conscious of his size.  I recall seeing other newborns when he was just two or three weeks old and gaping at my wife with the question, "Was he ever that small?" We are more than a little anxious about how the expectations and perceptions of him are altered because of his size and while we may have done him an advantage academically by waiting an extra year before sending him on to kindergarten, there may be greater expectations of him as he towers over the other kids in his class.

Ultimately though, he is a prodigious hugger and (if they allow that in school) I think he is the kind of kid that can help bring together a room of kids.  We that thought and the insistence that we want, above all, for him to be a good, kind sensitive boy and man, we send him into the world.