Don't Tell Him I Said So

I spent the morning fetching Son-Two from college, where he is a third-year physics major and currently in the midst of No-Shave November so sporting a sprinkling of facial hair. He was up until four a.m. for some last minute before break bonding with his friends where he lost his last ten dollars in a poker game. He is 6'2" and a month and half away from his 21st birthday, full of a not entirely unwarranted cynicism about the state of the world, but this morning when he climbed into the van, for just a split second, I flashed on him at four.

He was breathlessly enthusiastic about a wide variety of things--sometimes he talked so loud and so fast at that age that I had to translate for other family members who couldn't keep up. He loved mazes and puzzles and anything that challenged his brain, but also ran through life as though in his own action movie or video game, sometimes literally bouncing off walls. He's the only one of my children who's broken a bone--and he'd broken two by his sixth birthday. (Thankfully and a little miraculously none since then.)

Once, when he was four, he and I had a rare moment alone on a moonlit night walking along the creek that ran behind our house . He was holding my hand, looking up at the night sky and he said, "I wish I had a magic pencil so I could play dot-to-dot with the stars."

It was one of those moments a mom holds in her heart forever.