A letter to my son

                Just last week a plane went down in the Indian Ocean. There were two hundred and thirty nine people, two of whom were infants, who traveled from this world into the next. To say there are no guarantees in life is to recite a simple cliché. And yet, clichés exist as clichés because they recite truths, some that are too easily swept beneath our sea of thoughts. I suppose that’s why I’m writing you now, to remind both of us what you were like at 15 months. It’s conventional wisdom in these sorts of scenarios to say that it will be a treasure for you years down the road, to know what I was thinking about you in early 2014, but I think it’s a gift now even before you can read the words.

                After your bath, when you are wrapped in a white towel, your red hair curls in the back middle. It looks like a lion’s mane if it had been permed. This is appropriate because you still growl at every animal you see in books. Sometimes, we can convince you that an owl hoots or that a cow says moo, but you quickly seem to forget, or not care and go around growling at hens and pigs all the same. No one is scared of you.

                You love to play peek-a-boo because it is a delightful game. Though, as I said, most things delight you. At this stage, you mainly point at things and grunt. It’s not always clear what you are saying, but it seems to be something along the lines of “look at that, what a wonder,” like when you pounded on the cold glass of our front window for fifteen minutes as I shoveled snow.

                You are an agreeable little child, possessed of a sort of a quiet calm. You routinely sit in the back of the car as we take your sister to and from school, occasionally making noise to remind us that you are there. I’d recommend that you keep such a disposition as the world provides no guarantees, so you might as well be content in it.

                You laugh fairly frequently, often when you are holding two blocks in your hands or when you knock a book off the shelf. Look at what I’ve done you say, and we tell you that we are proud. You’ve gotten into the habit of bringing me my shoes before we go outside, carrying them over proudly aloft in your hands like an Olympic torch or a ribbon from school.

                We read you books, but you are not quite like your sister. You like to sit on our lap as we read, but if you are not tired you will leave in the middle of the story to retrieve another book that you’d like to read instead, though sometimes, after you sit down with the book it turns out that all you want to do is throw it on the floor.

                I think you have a good arm, but I am biased. If I coach your little league team someday, I will make you the pitcher because that’s what dads of little league teams do, insist that their children are the best. At times you throw the ball with your left hand, and I worry that you will be different. Isn’t it just better to throw with your right? You’ve already got red hair. Just fit in kid. We were watching basketball the other day in the basement, two days after you learned to walk, and you learned to dunk on a tiny hoop downstairs. I am here to report that you were delighted, and so was I.

                You have always been on the large size for your age and people ask me if you are going to play football. I always tell them no because you are too gentle of a boy. Though I confess that when we went outside the other day for the first time in months you were delighted to be waving around your first stick, which you were probably imagining was a sword. And when I looked up from weeding to hear your diabolical laugh I saw that you had broken the stick into three pieces. Perhaps you are already learning that the pen is mightier than the sword, or perhaps you liked breaking it. I should say hear that you have a diabolical laugh, a quiet villain’s chuckle. The chuckle is two quick intakes of breath that are short but deep, making a kind of guttural yet very amused noise. Your real laugh is reminiscent of your sister’s. Your intake of breath is quick and accompanied by a high pitched squealing, perhaps the noise that a pig would make if it wasn’t always growling.

                You have four teeth and are capable of eating an apple. When you are given pieces of banana you seem to regard it as some sort of eating challenge and attempt to stuff the whole thing in your mouth, which never works. Whenever I give you sliced almonds they always wind up getting strewn all over your chair and the floor because it turns out that nothing slides so pleasingly as sliced almonds.

                You learned to dance before you could walk: coordinating arm and head movements while squatting though pretending like you couldn’t yet walk. It’s good to keep people guessing sometimes.  The first word that you learned to say was “hi,” though I suppose it was hey. At first when someone walked in the door you would yell, “hey” at them before crawling away. Now, I assume because you are such an agreeable little boy, you’ve taken to saying “hi” in a voice that would be described as sweet and seductive if it wasn’t attached to a fifteen month old boy. One of your favorite people to say hit to you is yourself in front of the mirror. Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

                I suppose this is all just a very long-winded way of saying that I’m proud of you, which is a strange thing to say about someone who regularly poops and demands that you change it, but I’m proud. Just now I put you down for a nap and as soon as you knew what was happening you started to cry. I shut the door anyway and said goodbye because we have this short little time span in your life when I know better than you do. Now you are upstairs, napping peacefully, head cocked to the side, butt up in the air, sleeping the sleep of a contented child.