As Kate aged into little girlhood, I didn’t see any reason to reflect on my predilection for girls. She was a difficult little girl, at that; she had stomach problems, and she was willful, and she either changed the rules of games we played in mid-game or simply cheated, showing less remorse than a Republican.
One day when she was about 18 months or so, she woke up from a nap sobbing uncontrollably. Nothing I could do would cheer her up. She wouldn’t even meet my eye; when I tried to meet hers, she shifted her eyes to the other side, over and over. Finally I heard a lawnmower running. It was the guy across the street, on a huge riding mower over a small lawn. He wore a white bandana over his whole head. His name was Craig, but we called him Keg in deference to Kate’s early problems with “r”. I asked, “Why does Keg have a dipe [Kate for “diaper”] on his head? Keg? What are you doing? Why does he mow his lawn with a dipe over his whole head?”
That did the trick. She stopped crying, at first grudgingly, and then she started giggling. I played it out as long as I could, Keg wearing a dipe, and finally we were back to equanimity.
Little boys seemed utterly to lack any sense of self-awareness. Actually, as late as their junior year, Kate and I were on the ferry and one of the kids whom she’d known from first grade was bounding around, bouncing off of the booths, using them as hand-holds for his gymnastics—though he was overweight and ungainly.
“Is that H?” I asked.
She didn’t give him a glance, not needing to. “Yes.” Her tone icy and unforgiving.
“He acts like he’s in middle school! Has he always been like that?”
“Yes,” she said. “Can we talk about something else?”
I didn’t realize it in that moment, but later I realized that my 2 year old daughter had what my Auburn freshmen generally lacked: a sense of irony. She also had a sense of irony about being an only child. Among her friends, she invented a brother named Nicholas. “Nicholas?” I asked when he came up in conversation.
“Yeah. He’s my brother. But he misbehaved too much, so we had to send him to boarding school in Switzerland.”
That cracked me up, but Nicholas—Nick, as he became familiarly known—came up in conversation only on my initiative. He, her brother, became only an afterthought for her.
And the idea of having a son didn’t really stay with me. Simply drive past the high school and there was ample visual evidence of why I didn’t want a boy: without sounding creepy, I hope, allow me to say that the young women are universally gorgeous, no matter what style, preppy, goth, artist, generic, whatever she chose. The boys are universally unappealing. (Kate’s boyfriend was the only exception, a perfect young man.)
And the few encounters I had with them didn’t help much; they were polite, yes, being Bainbridge kids, but they are inarticulate and, apparently according to Kate, prone to sexual assault. Extrapolating from a couple of protests held recently at the high school, too many of them are.
So I didn’t give the thought of a son another second of consideration. Not that, as old as Nancy and I were, we’d consider having another kid anyway. I just had no regrets.
Then, quite a propos of nothing and because I read about eight news sources before I turn to the novels and nonfiction, I came upon an article about something that always intrigued me: what to do about meeting a dog’s eyes.
I had read earlier that dogs considered it rude and wouldn’t. Our shar pei/lab mix, Cherry Cho Chang Potter the Chinese Fighting Dog, never met our eyes. But then Cherry didn’t seem all that inclined to have much association with us at all. “No,” Dr. Penn of Winslow Animal Hospital said, “Shar peis aren’t very social.”
Then we acquired Lord Santorini, Duke of York, an accidental Yorkiedoodle who’d been found wandering the woods outside of Fresno, covered by ticks, skinny, and fur matted—clearly abandoned. Who could have had the lack of heart to have abandoned the cutest of little fellows?
He requires a lot of attention. He’ll jump on you (that’s our fault) and if Nancy doesn’t pet him enough, he’ll stand off at the side growling at her. If anyone reading this blog were to come to our house and were to sit down, within minutes, he’d crawl up into your lap and fall asleep. So it’s a double-edged sword.
Then one day I read that article about meeting a dog’s eyes. No, apparently they want to meet your eyes, and when they do, they’re creating a bond with you. That doesn’t explain Cherry. So I encountered Santorini; when I’m at the house and in the smaller chair in the sun room, he’ll come in and sleep in the one next to me.
One day, he came in and jumped up in the chair and sat, staring at me. I took the challenge and stared back at him. And he kept staring, and I kept staring. I don’t know how long this went on, but it wasn’t short.
And at some point I had another thought: I could talk to you, Santorini. I get you. We can connect. I have so much to tell you. Of course, Lord Santorini is a dog.
So I have so much to tell a son.
My dad’s father died when Dad was seven. Dad didn’t have a role model, and he didn’t know how to be a dad. He did the best he could, and I’m very grateful. But it wasn’t the best experience. When I was a confused young teenager, he’d come into my room and lie down in bed with me so I could talk to him. But I didn’t have the language to describe what it was like to be a loser in junior high school.
In the event, he fell asleep a lot—he worked hard, got up early, I get it, and I don’t resent him for it. Each night, he’d say, “And, we’ll talk like this again,” which only left me confused and resentful. What had we talked about? Then that was it; he was gone for the evening, and he hadn’t done anything to help me understand why I was a loser.
Lord Santorini thinks he runs this house, and he has no reason to need someone to talk to. But, staring at him, I suddenly understood that I had what Dad necessarily didn’t, the capability to understand how to grow a kid in the 21st century. I might have been really good at it. Now I wish there would have been a Nicholas. Maybe we wouldn’t have had to send him to Switzerland.
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