Wait It Gets Better

Graham, like many 4-year-olds, is into super heroes, his favorite being neither Superman nor Captain Marvel, but a pale imitation called Kewl Breeze, who peddles “airated” tennis shoes. We have a piece of advertising masquerading as a comic book — in which Kewl Breeze puts on his “airators” and battles the evil Blacktop, a golem made of hot tar who causes Kewl Breeze’s friends to have stinky feet — which if I have read to him once I have read 100 times.

“Wouldn’t you rather I read Hulk or X-Men?”

“No.”

He listens without a word, then when I’m done furrows his eyebrows. Half a minute goes by, then:

“How him alive?”

“Who, Kewl Breeze?”

“No. Blacktop.”

“Well, sometimes you can make a man out of stuff.”

“But how him alive?”

Should I tell him about the Golem of Prague? I elect for the Talmudic story of God breathing life through Adam’s nostrils.

He looks doubtful.

“It’s sort of like a robot. A robot is sort of alive.”

He’s still dubious. What I dread is going too far, which, when I do, always provokes the quick response, “What you talking about?”

“How are you alive?” I finally say.

This stops him. He cogitates a while, looks around the room meaningfully. We rest into the moment.

Then he says, “Tell about lizards.”

Civilizations rise and fall, their years being numbered around 500. If ours began with Jamestown, then we are at 400, which dovetails nicely with global warming. I am 100 years old. When I was young doctors made house calls and sent their bills in the mail. Made in Japan was a joke about shoddy goods. We had corporal punishment and drop drills at school. The phone number of my father’s store had 6 digits–there were no area codes, no zip codes. And there was only one kind of kryptonite.

Now I read in the paper, or dreamed I read, that women’s voices are deepening. They are sounding more and more like men. Take that, creationists!

Graham, in the next room, is moping because I won’t give him a vitamin pill.

“You’ll choke on it.”
“No I won’t.”
“I even choke on it.”

I crush the pill and feed him some. “Good,” he says, but doesn’t ask for more. He’s on to rolling his ball.

“Why does it roll straight?”
“Newton’s First Law of Motion.”

He repeats the phrase. He is inventing physics. He will certainly win a MacArthur grant, at the very least. He will discover new kinds of kryptonite, new phone numbers with eight, nine, ten dimensions. But it’s all too fast. I am still trying to remember whether women’s voices are really deepening, or if it was just a dream.

And we have only 100 years left.