The Raging Elitist

Lying on the couch watching a movie with Scotty’s head on my shoulder, neither one of us wanted to admit to our discomfort. We both adjusted and readjusted for a half hour, wanting the moment of closeness to last, at the same time wanting to separate and have our own space. Scotty was the one who finally gave in, turning to look at me and ask, “Can I go sit with Mommy?” I gladly assented. I had gutted out the shoulder and back pain without belying my love. I can’t say exactly the reason, but with Scotty, it seems my love is always being put to the test.

No doubt there is some brotherly jealousy at work. For one thing, Cartter’s swimming has taken off. He swims in my lanes during practice and is one of the stars of his group while Scotty swims a couple lanes over with the more developmental kids. Scotty’s no slouch, but being the younger brother, the inevitable comparisons to Cartter are tough. Sitting next to his mother in the bleachers during a meet, Scotty was surrounded by cheering parents while Cartter swam yet another state qualifying time, this one in the 100 IM. “Why is he so good?” Scotty asked.

Besides the attention that his brother gets through swimming, Scotty has to deal with the fact that Cartter and I are more alike. Neither of us have a poker face. We’re quick to smile and just as quick to worry. What you see is what you get, and being so alike, we can say a lot to each other without saying anything at all. Cartter and I could be sitting in the living room, and all we have to do to share a laugh is to look at each other for a moment. When I tell him I love him, Cartter will often say, “I know” or sometimes, “Me too.” Scotty is more mercurial, more difficult to interpret, more like his mother.

Danyelle sees it too. She even apologized recently when she saw some of her more difficult-to-navigate tendencies manifest in our younger son. For several days, Scotty had been trying out the idea that eventually, I would stop loving him and his brother. On this occasion, he coupled that accusation with the question, “Why do you always work on the computer?” and the opinion that what I do “looks pretty easy.” This came on a Saturday night, in the middle of a weekend during which I spent twenty-five hours working on the pool deck, living on swim meet food, pounding antacids and taking Ambien to go to sleep. I banished him to his room, and Danyelle went to act as his prison warden, but she soon grew distracted by the laundry, at which point Scotty escaped, reappearing in the living room to say, “I can tell you why I was crying . . . Because of YOU.” Out of ideas, I banished him anew.

There’s a stubbornness to these moods Scotty indulges. That’s what Danyelle felt the need to apologize for. My default when I see a loved one in emotional distress is to try to get a laugh, but it only seems to make Danyelle and Scotty dig their heels in more. I took to the electric keyboard when Scotty started his attack on me and sang a song about a baby who accuses his daddy. The song got Scotty to laugh sure enough, but the fact that it worked made him so mad that he also cried and doubled down on his meanness. I told him I would do anything for him, and he said through tears and stifled laughter, “Would you get chocolate?” Of course, anything. “So get the chocolate,” he said. I was stunned. Later, when he was in bed with the lights out and asked, “Now do you love me?” I was actually afraid. My God, I thought, my son is a monster!

Scotty doesn’t always withhold his laughter: He gets full-on giddy with his brother, and I can whip the two of them up into near pee-pants hysteria narrating their antics in a game of charades. It’s like he has strict rules about when I’m allowed to make him laugh. Obviously, when he’s in a crying mood, laughter is out: Don’t even think about trying to cheer him up. Also, if there’s a serious matter at hand, clowning is discouraged. I gave him a piano lesson on the twinkle variations I learned as a kid, and he noted that they were all “the same thing,” which they are, in the sense that the chord and melody structure is identical in each. “Exactly,” I said, “but it’s about technique.” The variations have different rhythms that necessitate proper hand position and strengthen small muscles. After I gave my line about technique, I ran my fingers rapidly up and down a chromatic scale, demonstrating what technique practice could yield. Scotty could barely conceal a little chuckle as he got up and left the room. No clowning allowed. Lesson over.

As my love is always on trial, being on the receiving end of Scotty’s attention can be a wonderful surprise, a gripping opportunity to prove myself. Lately, he’s been reading a Teddy Roosevelt biography for school, and he’s taken to sharing information with me once I get home from the pool at night, tidbits about the former president like, “He made the Grand Canyon,” and “He had a daughter named Alice who smoked at an unusual age.” “Here’s the most interesting part,” Scotty said one night, “the pets,” and then he listed all the exotic animals Roosevelt kept in the White House, along with their official-sounding names. As I’m sometimes the object of scorn, it’s an honor to be on the receiving end of all this tenderly offered knowledge, which Scotty has organized into post-it notes that mark certain pages in his book, a book which may well end up tucked into the “memory drawer” of the desk in his room.

Hopefully, I’m measuring up to Scotty’s standard. I was a little worried by his response to the movie we watched the night we awkwardly shared the couch. The film was Miracle,the Disney interpretation of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team story, and it centered on Coach Herb Brooks, played by Kurt Russell. “Is he the bad guy?” Scotty asked at several points before concluding about two-thirds of the way through, “It seems like he’s the bad guy.” “Oh, here comes the bad guy,” he later said.

Knowing that Scotty has seen me as a coach for his entire life, I thought I’d prefer it if he assumed the coach of the team was the good guy. Despite my concern, a rare opportunity presented itself at the movie’s conclusion. Seeing me tickle his brother, Scotty hopped down from the couch, lay on the floor, and lifted his arms over his head expectantly. He, of course, immediately pulled them back down, but the signal couldn’t have been clearer. I pried his arms loose from his sides and tickled him near to panic. Later, he didn’t ask if I loved him at bedtime.

Charades

We let the kids stay up until 10 p.m. this past Saturday night. It was the middle of a long weekend, and the boys combined their efforts in charades, acting out the words as a team. As mentioned above, my narration of their ridiculous attempts sent them into pee-pants-level hysteria. Cartter liked to use (or misuse) Scotty as a prop. One of the words was plunger, so Cartter had Scotty squat with his knees together while Cartter rammed an invisible object toward his crotch. Unsurprisingly, Danyelle and I were confused.

Cartter acting out “hitting your thumb with a hammer” was another strange highlight. He made repeated, hard, rhythmic blows with his invisible hammer, and none of them caused him any pain. He just went on smashing his thumb, totally stoic, save for his frustration with our lack of understanding.

At the end of game, Sammy hopped up in Cartter’s bed and slept with him. I thought that surely she would come trotting back out to join us in the living room once she grew tired of Cartter’s restless excitement at having her with him. She didn’t, though.

“She claimed him,” Danyelle said, citing Cartter’s habit of feeding her and playing with her in the mornings.

Bad Things

When we had to attend a baptism for Danyelle’s niece and nephew, Danyelle presented me with two dress options. “Which one should I wear?” she asked.

Reflexively, I answered, “The smaller one.”

It was shorter than I thought, and Danyelle’s legs garnered a few remarks from the other attendees. Her younger brother said after the service that I “brought a harlot to church.”

Some light petting ensued on the drive home, and when Danyelle and I snuck away to the bedroom, I detected a small presence following us.

Cartter held both his hands in front of him and twiddled his thumbs as he crept closely behind. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making sure you aren’t doing bad things,” he said with a nervous laugh. He knows about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy already. I’m pretty sure he’s onto us.

Not With a New Baby

We made a massive clean-up effort during the long weekend, and Danyelle and the boys uncovered an old camcorder with videos on it from 2015 and 2016, the time spanning the leadup to Danyelle’s and my marriage and the first months of Cartter’s life. Danyelle and I sat together and in the course of minutes watched ourselves go from carefree fiancés renting an apartment in Boston to stressed out homeowners and parents.

Watching Cartter take solid food for the first time on the little fold out screen, I was whisked away to that whirlwind time. Danyelle reminded me how preoccupied we were with Cartter eating (he was a small baby), and we both noted how young and tired we both looked and how we fussed over every little thing, never quite sure what to do. Still, I thought we looked like a pretty good team.

We watched a young Sammy vie for our attention while we fed Cartter, and I said to Danyelle, “Remember when I used to think it was better having a dog than a baby?” Since then, the boys have gotten better and, in many ways, easier; meanwhile Sammy has stayed the same. She’s a baby and an old lady all at once, still with all her energetic bad habits and compulsive eating, plus a bad leg to boot.

“Don’t you wish you could go back and do it all again?” I asked. I meant that it might be nice to go back and relive those moments, to travel into the camera and inhabit the body of the images onscreen, to really remember. As soon as I said it, though, I was reminded of all the wishes-gone-wrong stories one is told in childhood, the genies and monkey paws. “Not with a new baby,” I clarified.

Bull Moose

For years I’ve called Scotty “the Scott Hog” or “the Hog” for short. It’s all the more satisfying, because he has almost no reaction to it, except for occasionally asking at bedtime where the name came from. He even tolerates me loudly announcing him as the Hog in front of the team during swim practice. I don’t remember exactly the nickname’s origin, but when I see Scotty truck a 50 butterfly in lane nine, his little legs kicking his arms up over the water, it seems to suit him perfectly. I think he might always be the Scott Hog at the pool. At home, though, he’s also a bull moose now, a nickname derived from his fascination with Teddy Roosevelt.

The first thing Scotty told me about Roosevelt was that he was shot. That was where his book began, in the middle, with Roosevelt about to give a speech. Scotty showed me that he was reading another book with a similar “in medias res” structure, pulling a copy of Ghost Patrol from his room and displaying the pictures on the first page and one of the middle pages. More than his fascination with the structure of the biography, though, he was very intrigued with Roosevelt’s response to being shot. His eyes were big behind his glasses, as he sat next to me at the dining room table explaining that Roosevelt went ahead with the speech. “Do you know what he said?” he asked me, pausing to drive home the point. “He said . . . That’s not enough to kill me.”

The correct line is, of course, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” which Scotty liked even better. When I say goodnight to him, now, I sometimes make a bull moose call that sounds something between a horn blast and a fart.

Trumpet Player

Scotty continues practicing his trumpet, if somewhat more sporadically now that Christmas break is over and school, swimming, and piano take up much of his time. He can hit lots of different notes at this point and can play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Mary Had a Little Lamb quite well. He still asks me a lot if it makes me mad that he wants to play trumpet. Other times he’ll ask me if I want him to learn the trumpet. I’m always very open about my excitement at his potential to actually learn such a wonderful and challenging instrument, and I think he just likes to hear me say it.

Dental Operation

Scotty’s always been quick to wiggle free a loose tooth, so I was shocked when his right lateral incisor reduced him to whining. He claimed it was turned at such an angle that the root was jabbing the inside of his gum.

Upon inspection, I found that the tooth was kind of recessed behind the two surrounding teeth and therefore hard to get at. Danyelle spent some time trying to wrestle it out, but her efforts were to no avail, and she called me in as a substitute. I remembered reducing Cartter to panicked tears when I tried to extract his first loose tooth, and I had no faith that I’d be of any use in this situation with Scotty. Much to my surprise, once I placed the forceps Danyelle bought on Amazon firmly on either side of the tooth, I immediately yanked it right out with a firm tug. “Ow,” Scotty said, and the two of us were suddenly staring at the end of the forceps in my right hand. The extracted tooth there held was a jagged little fucker with a long, pointy root. No wonder he was having trouble.

Cartter asked me at bedtime when the “tooth fairy” was going to come and reiterated his knowledge of her and Santa Claus.

Team Manager

After entering him in the first two big swim meets of the short course season, I’ve held Scotty out of the last three. He was sick in December, and I saw no reason to force a seven-year-old into the seemingly endless slog of heats in the two January meets. That didn’t stop him from playing a key role in the team bleachers during all of his brother’s sessions.

I finally had to put an end to his passing out candy. I got tired of seeing the little athletes walking around with dumdums in their mouths. Scotty would approach kids after what he deemed particularly good races and thrust a bag at them, becoming insistent if anyone tried to decline.

Once that duty was put to bed, Scotty took to drawing cartoon portraits of his teammates. One boy is a Parisian juggler; another is wrapped in toilet paper; still another is wearing an expression of panic, because the jet pack strapped to his back has unexpectedly ignited, and he is about to explode airborne. Some of these he passed out to the subjects. When we got home, he continued his work and included a “hum” ala Winnie the Pooh on the other side of the page. I made copies for him to pass out at practice on Monday.

The drawings are replete with faint lines to indicate motion, a technique he apparently learned from reading Dog Man comics. Not that long ago, when I was reading the boys A Wrinkle in Time and Watership Down and White Fang, Danyelle would lie in bed with them and read silly comics like Dog Man and Cat Kid Comic Club. I missed out almost entirely on those expansive series, save for the Dog Man movie, which I thought was actually really clever and well done. If Scotty’s art is a Dog Man imitation, it is still, as one coach on the staff who noticed it said, “low key pretty good.”

For me, the most interesting aspect was the way his choices seemed to reflect the kids’ actual personalities. One quiet boy who enjoys making fart noises is depicted wrapped in toilet paper and wearing cool shades; another, who is always smiling and boisterous, is a clown declaring that it’s his birthday; Cartter is the team mascot, looking extra goofy in a shark costume and wearing vampire teeth. “It’s all really on point,” my coaching colleague noted. She said she thinks the reason Scotty is so observant is that he wears his glasses on the tip of his nose.

The boys in the pictures are all part of the 9-10 group I coach. I refer to this subset of swimmers as the “nine-ten men.” A talented little cadre, they enjoy gathering before their races to receive instructions before marching toward the starting blocks together chanting, “Men! Men! Men! Men!” They’re inevitably clustered in the same couple of heats, and when they stand up on the blocks together, I holler to them, “Let’s Go Men!” I’m calling Scotty’s drawings of them, “Portraits of the Sharks as Young Men.”

Let’s Be A Dad and a Son

Saturday afternoon at a swim meet is typically the first session for Scotty and Cartter but the third session for me. By the time it rolls around, I’m already starting to get tired, and there are dozens of little kids in my charge with plenty of energy and questions to spare. There have been times when I go to sleep at night in the middle of a meet when I can feel little hands tugging at my shirt and little voices in my head saying, “Coach John! What heat am I in?”

When Scotty tugged on my shirt this past Saturday, he did it silently. He had no questions about heats and lanes, because he wasn’t swimming. He was as Coach Sydney put it “just chilling in crocs and matching team gear,” living his best life as a tiny team manager, a role he might gladly assume permanently rather than grind out a career as a swimmer. He was tugging at my shirt, because he had “a letter” for me. It was enclosed in a piece of paper that he’d folded about twenty-seven times into a small rectangle. On the outside of the little makeshift envelope were written the words “To John.”

I unfolded it in a hurry, and, finding the inside blank, told Scotty that I didn’t have time and that I had to work. He presented it to me again directly and pressed me to read the message inside. Tucked into a fold was a thin strip of loose paper. I don’t know if it was there before and I’d missed it, or if he had been playing games with me and had only now added it. The message read “Let’s be a dad and a son.”

I sat next to him later that night at Santi’s, a Mexican restaurant on the way out to the beach, and I enjoyed periodically repeating to him, “Let’s be a dad and a son,” a refrain which produced a little smirk from beneath the blue Smithsonian Institute ballcap he’d picked out for the occasion.

The following evening, Sunday, the meet finally over, I grabbed him to take Sammy on a walk and made an impromptu detour to the boat landing. It was dead low tide, and a cold fog had come in from the harbor so that the flags on nearby docks hung perfectly still. Sammy lay down on the dock, and Scotty and I stood and watched a squadron of pelicans cruise back and forth over Shem Creek. They twisted and turned to follow the water’s path, taking turns to rear up and divebomb their prey. There was no sound except the faint drone of traffic on nearby Highway 17, and we could hear the birds hit the water even a hundred yards off. When one dove right in front of the landing, I glanced at Scotty, and he couldn’t help but smile, clearly satisfied.