EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Fatherhood
|
||||
|
Every night ends the way every morning begins, with the same word on my 2-year-old's lips, and the word is not Mommy or Daddy or Toonces-the-cat, but "fire." This is not as disturbing as you might think. You need to take these things in context. Before "fire" was the word "dish." "Dish," by the way, is not a dish at all, but a pot, an old stainless steel pot that was in my parents' house when I was a kid. My son renamed the pot a dish, and when he said "Dish!" we gave him the pot. We tried not to make an issue of the dish. So the boy liked to lug a pot around? There are worse things. One day my son and his pot were raising a racket while I was on the phone with my grandmother. "What's that noise?" she asked, and I said, "He's addicted to the pot!" That took a little explaining. There came a day when my son walked into the kitchen, looked up at me, and said, "Pee!" After I changed his diaper, he said it again. He pulled himself up on the counter, opened our childproofed utensil drawer, held up a clean, shiny spoon, and smiled. "Pee!" he said. "Spoon," I said. He shook his head and waved the spoon. "Pee!" Around our house, spoons became pees the way pots had become dishes, and we thought nothing of such exchanges as: Mom: "Have you seen the pee?" Dad: "It's in the dish." We were losing touch with civilized society. My son stirred and stirred, and the house got very loud. Sometimes my son hummed "Jingle Bells" when he stirred. We stopped listening to other music. He requested bigger dishes and bigger pees, and he got them. Everything, I'm telling you, was fine. And then the boy discovered fire. Up he pointed and up he climbed and "Oooh!" he exclaimed, and my son was sitting on the stove, watching the water boil. I pulled him down and told him NO and he smiled at me and pointed again, and then he said it for the first time: He said "fire." I congratulated him. It's always a thrill when they master a new word. The mornings were all the same after that. By 5:30, with the winter sky still dark out the window, our son was on the stove. The rhythm of the dawn was something like this: Take him down from the stove, say No, take bread from the fridge, say No, take him down, say No, take a slice, say No, take him down, say No, toast a slice, Say No, take him down...Our son learned to say "No" with 72 different inflections. I think he'll be a skillful speaker of Chinese. When we turned off the fire and the kasha was cooked, he asked us to turn it on again. He never put his hands or his face or his feet anywhere near the fire. He didn't challenge the fire, or try to possess it. He treated the fire with respect. He pointed at it thoughtfully and said "Boo-boo." Our son wasn't a fire addict; he was a fire student. Which only led us to wonder, is being a fire student any better than being a fire addict? How many steps from pyromania is pyrology? Is there really any use in the study of fire? And then, one morning, this past Tuesday to be precise, our son came to our room at 5:17 and climbed on the bed and, as always, said "fire" and then "dish" and then "pee." And then something wonderful happened. Our son said "egg." Four days in a row now, we've eaten omelets, feeling the bad cholesterol rise together with the good feeling that all the things that mystify us will somehow, some way, end up making perfect sense. Greg Blake Miller of Las Vegas has completed his first novel. He is a regular contributor to this column. |
||||
RSS Subscribe
Digg This ArticleSEARCH THE SITE
