There's One in Every Class

Photo from Flickr user Jez Page

How can you compose a eulogy for a six-year-old?

What do you say? They're not even at the beginning of their lives. What do you have left? Crayon drawings. Favorite books. Evanescent videos, recordings, photographs. Of course, photographs. We all take thousands of photos of our kids as if they're going to be snatched away from us any moment. We capture every moment, every romp in the park, every play date, every birthday candle, as if it will be the last.

If I think too much about what it must feel like, I just die inside. It cripples me. Because those kids who died in Newtown were our kids. Those children were just like the kids in my son's classroom.

I was just in my son's classroom on Friday. He has a decent-sized class. And there's the usual diversity. You've got the chatty kids and the sad, lonely kids who cry sometimes, under their desks or behind a table. You've got the girls with the pretty pretty hair they can't wait to tell you about. You've got the girls who barely seem like they comb their hair in the morning. You've got the bright-eyed, curious ones, filled with joy, beaming as though from an inner light. The ones who see every adult as a helper and every kid as a friend they haven't met yet. You know the kind. There's one in every class.

And you've got the odd ducks. The ones who glower in the corner, who make big red X's on their papers instead of completing assignments. The ones who flap their arms and shake in their seats and maybe they talk to themselves a little bit. Maybe they wear clothes a little odd, a little askew. They're quirky. I like that word. Quirky. It's not judgmental. I know a lot of quirky adults and I bet they were quirky kids, too. There's one in every class, you know.

Anyway, the arm flappers. The odd ducks. There was one in Newtown. One who died. His mother gave a eulogy for him. She said that he flapped his arms, and one day she asked him, why, and he said it was because he was a beautiful butterfly.

I didn't know this kid, but apparently he had some language challenges. Yet he could still express this, because it was the only possible answer to this question. Of course he was a butterfly. Just like my son is a monster. Of course this is true. It has to be. It's the only thing that can be true.

That kid was autistic. My son is autistic. For a while, I just said he had Asperger's, as if it was some different thing. But my kid is on the spectrum. He is autistic, and when I think about that beautiful butterfly, flapping his arms, I can't help but see my son.

He's not a flapper, by the way.  That's not his thing. He's a spinner, though. Sometimes he spins around and around, and sometimes he takes scarves or belts or just lengths of string and spins them in his hand, around and around and around. He jumps on beds, and he loves giving kaboom hugs. Y'know, the kind of hugs where he starts across the room, and gets a running start and charges at you and KABOOM! You get a hug that rattles your teeth. That's my kid. That's what he does.

I can't think too much about what happened in Newtown, but I know this. The kids in those classrooms were just like the ones in my son's classrooms. The bright ones and the dark ones, the pretty ones and the smudgy ones, the steady, calm ones and the arm flappers. Those kids remind me too much of his class, and your children's classes, and every classrooms. These weren't characters in a movie or a novel. These were just kids. Like my kid. Like yours.

Goddammit. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to sleep tonight. I just keep thinking about that little boy, the beautiful butterfly, and my heart breaks and breaks and breaks again.

Freddy Update

Oliver: "Last night Freddy killed 900 monsters. That's a lot!"

He explained that Freddy could make some kind of energy ball appear in his hand "and it can destroy monsters!" He told me the name of the ball, but I couldn't make it out. It was one of his nonsense words, I think, although it could have been a word learned from one of his friends at school. The concept sounds like something out of a cartoon - Dragonball Z or Pokemon? Sound familiar to anyone out there?

Monsters, Part Two: Good Monster Freddy

Is this Freddy?

The Good Monster Freddy report today:

Today, Freddy is four. Tomorrow, he will be five. The next day, he will be six.

Fun fact about Freddy: he cannot jump. (No explanation given. Maybe he doesn't have knees?!)

~ ~ ~

One day, after months of imagining monsters in every closet and around every corner, Oliver started talking about one monster who had a name, Good Monster Freddy.

(One unusual note: we don't have any friends named Freddy. I don't even think we own any storybooks with a character named Freddy. I have no earthly idea where the name came from, but that was his name and it's stuck. We've never heard him give a name to any other monster. Freddy's the only one.)

He talks about Good Monster Freddy all the time. His invisible world of monsters has transformed into one invisible and constant companion.

Oliver lives a parallel life with Freddy. When he's eating, Freddy is eating, often an identical meal. When he's waking up, Freddy is either still in bed or he's been awake "for hours!" Freddy lives in his own world, and somehow, as if he had one of those Lost-type wormholes, Oliver can see right into it and narrate the goings-on.

Freddy often comes along with us on trips and errands. We've been informed that Freddy has a tiny car that drives right under our car. Sometimes, though, he rides in the back seat with Oliver. He eats snacks with Oliver, joins him for dinner, lays down at bedtime with Oliver. He's your classic invisible friend.

We have no idea what Freddy looks like. Some days, he's tiny. Some days, he's 100 feet tall and has fifty heads and 300 arms. We've never seen him. (Obviously. Duh.)

He also don't know how old he is, because that changes every day. The only rule that he's established is that Freddy is a different age every day, and that seems to be the constant. Some days, he's one hundred. Some days (as in today), he's four. Some days he's a baby monster, some days an adult monster.

The monster war is still going on, incidentally, but it all happens through the lens of Freddy. Some days, we'll get the report that the bad monsters killed Freddy's parents. The next day (forgetting the last day's massacre), he'll tell us that Freddy killed every bad monster and ate all their heads. It changes every day.

We learn new things about Freddy every day, and some of them are completely out of left field. I'll try to post new Freddy facts as they arrive, but he's already delivered so many that I can't remember. Freddy is essentially the proxy for Oliver's ever-expanding imagination. He's the launch pad for a thousand crazy stories and wild flights of fancy. It's a hilarious and absolutely charming development.

Some day, he's going to outgrow his friend Freddy. I'm going to really miss him when that day arrives. I kinda like the guy.

Monsters, Part 1: Good Monsters, Bad Monsters

Our life is filled with monsters. Good monsters, bad monsters, nice monsters, mean monsters. They're everywhere. At least, they are to Oliver. He sees monsters everywhere he turns.

Monsters are a presence in most American kids' lives. They're in hundreds of books - from Maurice Sendak's Wild Things, to the weird creatures who inhabited Dr. Seuss' work, to modern classics like the Gruffalo (pictured above). They're just a presence, and it's small wonder that so many kids are fearful of monsters under the bed. They hear about monsters all the time - at some point, they just begin believing in them for reals.

When it started, Oliver had a typical kid's relationship to monsters: they were bad, they hid under beds and behind closet doors, and they were scary. I had a can of "monster spray" (a relabeled can of air freshener) that I would dutifully spray around his room when he thought there were monsters in there.

Then, the pattern changed. He started announcing that there were bad monsters, but that the good monsters were keeping them out of the house. I don't remember suggesting that good monsters were out there - that was all him.

And then, so gradually we didn't even notice it, the description of the monsters started getting - I don't know the right word. It started getting creative. Eccentric. Weird.

Maybe it was when he started telling us that he couldn't sleep because bad monsters were playing their instruments too loud. That's the first time I remember him getting really weird with the monster talk.

Eventually, monsters became his primary topic of conversation. Bad monsters were outside of the car, trying to pull him out of his car seat, but the good monsters wouldn't let them. Good monsters were constantly fighting with the bad monsters. Bad monsters wouldn't let him eat his food. Good monsters were directing traffic. He would talk about bad monsters who sped and disobeyed traffic rules, and the good monster police who would arrest them and put them in jail.

On some level, they were his version of angels and devils. There was a war being fought between mischievous entities - the bad monsters - and the ones who maintained order and goodness - the good monsters. He would report the skirmishes, but he was merely an observer to the battle. He couldn't change the results. He was just like Uatu, a watcher, permitted to observe but never to interfere.

He would wake up in the morning and be sad because a bad monster killed a good monster's mother. How do you placate someone who's mourning an invisible battle casualty?

He would announce the size of the opposing armies. There were a thousand good monsters, ten million bad monsters. The next day, there were five million good monsters and only a hundred bad monsters. It changed every day. Some days, he would tell us that all the bad monsters all died. The next day, it would change.

He rewrote the rules every day because, after all, it was his war. He remade the conflict every day and adjusted the players as he saw fit, like any good writer would. He would add tension, draw battle lines, create a heartbreaking loss, a triumphant victory. The only constant was the monsters. Whatever the numbers were, whatever was happening, wherever the fight was being waged, there were always good monsters and bad monsters.

And then one day, he introduced us to Freddy.

(to be continued...)

A Series of Observations

This morning's conversation with Oliver:

Oliver: "Daddy, monsters spin around all the time. And they never get dizzy. They get hungry!"

Me: "Oh, really. Why?"

O: "They get hungry because they don't have any tomatoes in their tomato soup. So they eat and eat and they get hungrier."

Me: "Oh."

O: "Daddy, did you know that monsters eat tomato soup all the time? It falls out of the sky!"

Me: "It falls out of the sky?"

O: "Yeah. That's why their houses don't have roofs. And did you know that they have tomato soup machines that catch the soup and put into cans?"

Me: "I didn't know that."

O: "They do. Good Monster Freddy's house is a tomato soup factory."

_________________________________________________

A few thoughts. Feel free to ignore this if you just want to enjoy the cuteness without explanation:

• He's been talking about monsters all the time. More on that later. He has an imaginary friend called Good Monster Freddy who he talks about all the time.

• The idea of soup falling out of the sky, obviously, comes from the story Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which I don't think we've read in a couple of months. He's read the story dozens of times, but we haven't seen the movie yet and I'm worried I'll hate the movie because I like the book so much.

• We also just read The Phantom Toolbooth, which I think is where the idea comes that you keep eating soup and keep getting hungrier. Remember the Subtraction Soup?

• He loves making up wild stories and presenting them to me with "did you know?" It's as if he has this whole secret history of the world, and he keeps quizzing me on it to see if I know as much about it as he does.

You Use the Tools That Are Available to You

We did the "three questions" thing again tonight, and he's still asking bizarrely eclectic questions.

Tonight's list:

1) Why are you and mommy married?

2) Why do we have a fan in our room?  

3) Why do we sleep on pillows?

Seriously, this kid makes me think.  I mean, think about it.  Why do humans sleep on pillows? He won't take an answer like "just because."  He wants a real actual reason.  I told him it was easier on your neck to sleep on a pillow, but fuck if I know.  

Later, he was telling me that there were monsters everywhere.  Monsters in the ceiling - "and they have really long arms, and they can touch the door and touch the fan at the same time! And even your guitar, too!"   Monsters were in our bedsheets.  They were living inside the fan.  "And they even set up a house next door to the fan where they live!"  Suddenly, inexplicably, our bedroom was lousy with monsters.

When he presents a problem like this (i.e. sudden monster eruption), I don't bother trying to solve it anymore.  When he was younger, I had a can of air freshener that I relabeled as "Monster Spray" that I'd spritz around the room to scare away the monsters.  Or I'd dutifully look under the bed, in the closet, under his pillow, and shout to scare away all the monsters.   Now, I just make him deal with it.

"So, Oliver," I ask, "what should we do about the monsters?"

"I don't know," he shrugs. 

I tried to guide him to a solution.  "Will your friends -" the various stuffed animals on the bed with him - "help get rid of the monsters?"

"No," Oliver shrugs," they don't have power like me."

"Oh, well then, how are you going to get rid of them?" I ask.  "What kind of power do you have?"

"I can shoot fireballs out of my penis!"  he shouts gleefully.

He gestures toward his crotch region, imagining a giant flamethrower rising out of his pull-up.  And makes fireball-shooting noises.  Pew pew pew!  He does this for a minute or two.  Shortly after that, he drifts off to sleep.  

I wonder if he does this with Mrs. B.