Spring break

For the better part of seven hours, I tossed and turned in the upper bunk of an Amtrak “roomette”, their quaint term for attempting the impossible of putting two people in a six foot three inch by two foot six inch space and allowing both of them to get a good night’s sleep.  One of us did: my son, who at six years old and three feet eight inches high is perfectly sized for such a space, slept the sleep of the gods.  He also had the bottom bunk; despite efforts at dinner, from both me and from the random couple from Chicago who sat with us, to convince him how much fun the top bunk is, he called the bottom bunk.

Making it worse was the fact that he wanted the night light on.  The night light is a low-wattage bulb in a five inch by three inch blue plastic enclosure.  If it were glowing faintly across a room – or, say, you only saw the indirect shine coming from above the bunk directly above you – it would probably be soft and lulling.  If the bulb is a foot from your eyes, however, even the low wattage is enough to be an impediment.  I kept thinking about all the press recently about limiting the “blue light” from screens in the hours before bed as even with my eyes closed tightly I could sense the glow.

I finished a book while my son read Busy Busy World by Richard Scarry.  I looked down at one point and he looked up and said “Hug?” but getting down would have roused him a bit too much, so instead I asked for one of his stuffed bears, gave it a big hug, and told him to give my son an even bigger hug back.  He caught the bear and snuggled him tightly as he nestled into the covers, yawning below me and eventually falling still.

At dinner he ordered the steak, but not the salad, as he announced loudly to one and all.  He also asked for bacon bits on his baked potato, and said he wasn’t going to eat any green beans.  I told him that he needed to eat at least two.  During the meal the couple from Chicago convinced him to eat some more beans in the same forkful as a bit of bacony, sour creamy potato. That worked too.

He’s made friends with another young boy, a bit older but who’s a bit… special.  The boy carries around a stuffed bear which is slightly larger than my son, and despite being probably two or three years older, his eyes and his speech reveal a sense of wonder, a sense of absolute joy, that even now in my almost-seven year old son I can see being pushed out by a sensation that the world isn’t quite fair, that not everyone is getting the same good things as everyone else, that maybe life is going to be a lot harder than train rides with Dad and a really good teacher and a Mom who loves him makes it seem like on the surface right now.  The other boy, though, having kept a sense of unadulterated joy and love and life in his eyes for even a few more years than six, is marking himself out as someone different.

My son has been so designated, by a child psychologist three and a half years ago roughly seven months after his parents split up and he moved away from his dad and back to a Seattle that he didn’t know.  In the intervening time it’s obvious to almost everyone except my ex-wife that our son is really pretty normal – a bit bookish and not interested in sports, but given his parents and their families, that surprises no one.  He’s a bit ungainly in social situations but having observed him with his friends in first grade, it seems to be about the norm for boys.

I volunteer at his school, which is a nice thing to do I suppose but it’s also an opportunity to see what being a six year old is like.  I was not normal at age six and I could even articulate that fact: I knew I was having conversations in my head, and with adults, that other kids weren’t having, and mostly they didn’t understand them and didn’t care.  A friend of mine, who is also a single parent, has said that her goal is to let her child have fun, to just see world in terms of the beauty of Maine and a dog and snow and laughter, for as long as possible. For me, that all wrapped up around four years old when I started to read books without pictures.  I haven’t looked back, but I’m intruigued now to see how my son and his friends are doing.  I didn’t have enough objectivity when I was his age to see what “childhood” was like; I was busy guarding my incipient adulthood, too busy trying to make sense of self-awareness at an age when most kids were blissfully unaware.

The boys are ungainly: their sentences carrying their own weird cadence of incorrect emphasis, poor word choice, and neck-snapping changes of topic.  Their bodies are all a bit strange too: some lean and wiry with big heads, like my son, some already building a kind of linebacker dominance to them, out of scale with the rest of the room.  There’s a few dreamy eyed kids, a few social butterflies – my son is one of them – and a few burly types who are embarrased by their strength, and one or two pre-bullies, kids who insert themselves in front of others, demanding attention, demanding respect but not doing anything to earn it.  I vaguely remember those dynamics but mostly I remembered finding the quiet corner with the books and reading as much as I possibly could, and sitting in the back of group time and trying not to be noticed.  My son sits in the middle.  He’s occasionally reminded not to talk to his neighbor.  I’m sort of proud of that.

The girls at age six and seven are confident and happy, although you can already see signs of cliquishness and coquettery, the girl with the not-quite-perfect leggings being shunned at choice time, for example, the same four girls always sitting together despite the teacher’s best efforts to break them up.  Some are already wearing clothing that would be viewed as “sexualized” – they’re definitely dressed more thoughtfully than the boys, but there’s also a bit of preening, hair done up nicely and clothing that’s coordinated.  They also want to be noticed, especially by a father volunteer: one girl stood up during story time, locked eyes with me, and started to pirouette.  The teacher asked her nicely to stop, and without breaking the stare, she sat down in front of me.

The only coordinated outfit among the boys is for the only African-American kid, who’s also the strongest and fastest kid in the class.  I have a sense that all of that is a lot of burden for a seven year old kid in first grade.

The boys neither shun nor do much in the way of self-identification.  They sort of form random groupings, coming together into little groups or teams and dissolving again in the course of a few minutes.

I thought about all of this while drifting on the outer edges of being awake, between Klamath Falls in Oregon and Sacramento.  Although the cities didn’t matter, really, except as markers on the timetable, benchmarks for determining whether we’re time or not.

I thought of my ex-wife, after having our quarterly divorce coaching session on Friday with a lot to talk about.  I thought about the ex-girlfriend, and girlfriends before her, and I thought about it in a spiralling way back to when I was little, when I was my son’s age, searching for the thread that tied everything together.  It’s not there, but part of the mystery of not sleeping in an enclosed space it that your mind dangles out the hope of that thread as a means of both getting you to sleep and of keeping your consciousness alive.

I thought about a dozen things I should be writing, a dozen work things I should get done in the next few days.  We pulled out of Chico and my body started warming up for the day, despite it being barely past three thirty in the morning.  I stayed in the bunk, staring and looking away from the blue night light. Finally I got up, fished out some clothes, got dressed – thankfully yoga has given me enough flexibility to get dressed even in a bunk – and kissing my son on forehead, went out to the observation car and started to write.

Good morning.  He’s up now… he just ran down the hallway.  Maybe there is a thread in there somewhere.