Family: Ah, To Be 7 Again

Hanging out with Vanal has been a lot of fun, and quite refreshing. It's fascinating to be reminded of what it was like for me to be that age. Yet he's very different than I was when I was seven years old -- a lot like I always wished I could be when I was a kid. Just as an example, you can hand him some money and send him into a store to buy something, and he looks forward to that social interaction, the mere threat of which would have reduced me to tears at age 7. There's just no way you could have got me to do it.

His social boldness is nothing next to his physical daring. If there's some feat of derring-do he would be afraid to tackle, we haven't encountered it yet in our adventures. He rushes headlong into everything, injury be damned. His knees are battlefield maps, the front of his skull smooth and thick like a ballpeen hammer. When he gets hurt (approximately 17 times per day) he occasionally sniffles for a moment, but I've never seen it last more than a minute, and then he's racing around again.

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to build crude wooden boats out of old boards and float them down our brook. So last week Vanal and I built a couple boats and brought them up to the trout stream about a half mile from our house. He quite literally threw himself into it. He has a certain laugh that is genuine and irrepressible, so you know he's truly having fun. It comes from the back of his throat and it goes, "O-Ho!" I heard that a lot as he charged down the brook chasing his boat, splashing along, slipping off the rocks, banging himself up.

Our modest beginnings started a neighborhood boat-building craze that has only in the past few days tapered off. Vanal's social skills have been good for us here. We've been fairly isolated out here, just exchanging polite pleasantries with our neighbors, but now a whole tribe of local kids whoops around our yard each day, Vanal spends his afternoons playing across the street, and on two recent evenings, I loaded up a Jeepful of neighborhood boys to go up and test the boats we'd all built on our porch. Obviously this has meant getting to know their folks a bit better.

Last weekend we went fishing, and seeing Vanal experience it gave me more flashbacks to age 7. I spent a lot of time fishing with my brother and cousins when I was Vanal's age or a little bit older, and I loved it and hated it. Hated the way you'd look down at your reel to make an adjustment and by the time you looked up again, your line had gotten tangled around the end of your pole. Hated fishing for hours and not getting so much as a nibble. Hated all the untangling, and tying, and snagging and failure. But loved the overall activity, loved being out there and all the anticipation. Vanal and 7-year-old The Blogger are very much the same in that regard -- a bit too physical, a bit impulsive, a bit impatient (although he's quite a bit better than I was). So I had to feign outrage on the second fruitless day when he finally got sick of it and flung his pole. I probably would have done it halfway through the first day.

Other random notes:

- He's got this game, or toy, or fetish, or talisman, called "Bakugan," which is something to do with some cartoon or other, and which involves small plastic rosary-bead-sized objects which fold out into fighting creatures and which cost $5 a pop but are undoubtedly produced by children his age for 0.13 cents apiece somewhere in the world. There's also a magnetized card with numerals on it which apparently is to be used in conjunction with the collapsible bead-beast. I've finally convinced him that I am never, ever going to play this with him, since to the extent that there are rules, they are more esoteric than the U.S. tax code and only understood by 7-year-olds (who I suspect may be faking).

- One evening, 12-year-old neighbor Austin (who has a story for whatever subject is at hand, even if he has to come up with one impromptu) claimed that he had once really gotten into poison ivy and that he'd gotten it "in a very sensitive place." Vanal thought for a second and then, obviously pleased to have gotten the innuendo, exclaimed, "O-ho! I know exactly where you mean! I can see it right now!"

- He cheats at everything. When you teach him a game, he figures out the way to cheat just as soon as the basic rules settle into his brain. I taught him 20 Questions the other day in the car. When it was my turn to guess, I quickly figured out that he was thinking of a race car (Didn't take much, since race cars are his lifelong obsession). So I said, "Is it a car?" And he says, "Well, sort of. It's part car." I said, "Do you race with it?" He says, "Well, you can," as if we were talking about tractors or lawn mowers. Later I made him explain how a race car is only part car. "Well, you have to have a driver, don't you?"

- He was trying to explain something he'd seen on TV yesterday but was lacking a particular word to describe the genre. Said, "You know, it's on TV but it's not really a show." Took me a minute, but then I figured it out. He meant a reality show. Perfect.

- He counted the lines on my face the other day. Told me you could tell how old someone was by doing so, just the way you count rings on a tree. Apparently I'm 40.