Even before I had children, I always imagined my kids would start getting much more tolerable between eight and ten years of age, that at that point they’d finally start to become real people whom an adult might deem acceptable company. Now that Scotty is eight, and Cartter nearly ten, I realize that in one sense, I was basically right. The boys aren’t drooling in highchairs or screaming and crying anymore – certainly, they’re more tolerable. In another sense, though, I was completely mistaken. Now that the kids have a modicum of understanding about the world and a more sophisticated grasp of language, no conversation is safe in their midst. Doggedly refusing to allow anything to go over their little heads, acceptable adult company they are not – unless one is comfortable taking responsibility for their corruption, which, fortunately, I am.
Long eager to join the ranks of the big and powerful, Cartter and Scotty’s thirst for knowledge is nothing new. They’ve started and ended each day with questions ever since they learned to talk, with bedtime being a preferred question-and-answer battlefield. When they’re in bed, they prefer difficult-to-answer questions designed to stump their recipient and prolong the time before the hallway light gets turned off, questions like “Why do our brains need sleep?” or “When did humans begin? . . . like, were they always a thing?”
Not that long ago, I was patient enough to consistently formulate meaningful responses to these questions, waiting for a moment’s pause before taking my leave. Then, I started deploying the stock answer “I don’t know” more frequently. Recently, I’ve taken to flipping out the lights and hollering “No more questions!” while Cartter and Scotty each shout stream-of-consciousness interrogations at me from their rooms. Picture a defense attorney ushering his client down the courthouse steps amid a gathering of insatiable reporters.
Part of the reason for my declining patience is that the boys have successfully stretched bedtime all the way to 9 p.m. Another part is that I truly don’t have as many answers anymore – the other day, Cartter wanted me to explain the theory of relativity to him, so I pulled up a YouTube video, prompting him to demand repeatedly “What does that mean!” – but as much as longer days and a dwindling supply of knowledgeable replies have contributed to my decreased tolerance of the nightly inquisition, so too has a loss of privacy during the hours that precede it. Airspace where Danyelle and I used to be safe is now closely monitored. The need to self-censor is growing along with the boys’ intellectual capacity, and it is exhausting to the point that we sometimes drop our guard and say in effect, “Fuck it,” allowing ourselves to fly freely as if we weren’t being constantly scrutinized.
So far, these allowances and the resulting divulgences regarding the vulgar adult world we inhabit and which the kids so desire to know do not appear to have inflicted too much harm – Cartter and Scotty know nearly all the curse words in the English language, and while they relish hearing me deploy them, they don’t use curse words themselves – but the boys’ appetite for forbidden knowledge is only increasing, and their ability to act on it is on the near-term horizon. As such I often find myself hitting the eject button in the middle of a careless conversational flight, parachuting down to Earth where I’m awaited by two savage blond-headed captors wearing baggy T-shirts and big, unflinching eyes that stare at me closely the way a dog watches a person eat. Instead of pointed spears aimed at me, my captors carry questions.
This past weekend, I dropped my guard during a discussion with Danyelle about horror movies we saw at an inappropriately young age, in the process provoking Cartter to grill me relentlessly. The comment that aroused his urgent curiosity had to do with an admission that Rosemary’s Baby, which I saw at age eleven, was equally as terrible as Evil Dead, which Danyelle saw at the same age. “Yes,” I said seated at the kitchen table, “it does have Devil Rape in it.” Instantly, I was reminded of my conversation wardens.
“What’s devil rape?” Cartter nearly shouted. “What is it?” I tried to ignore him, but his eyes burrowed into my soul so that I couldn’t help but laugh as I felt him staring at me. Sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, he watched his mother and me at the kitchen table, his gaze shifting from one parent to the other, trying to see if we would slip up and accidentally give away the meaning of this obviously taboo term. If either of us so much as turned in his direction, he’d repeat, “What is it?”
Unable to ignore him, I tried to turn the tables on him. Cartter’s been signaling recently that he knows about sex. “I know things” is all he’ll say, but it’s obvious what he’s talking about. He smiles and sneaks around trying to catch Danyelle and me in the act, presumably so he can burst through our bedroom door at just the right moment and blurt out triumphantly, “Aha! I knew it!” When he joined us at the kitchen table in the midst of the “Devil Rape” debacle, I said, “I thought you knew things.”
He was quick with his rebuttal. “I do know things,” he said smiling, and then he pointed his finger at me and with a slight wag of it said, “But I don’t know that.” I was caught. Confessing to him that Devil Rape is when the Devil makes you have his babies finally led to a gradual and satisfactory fizzling out of the conversation.
Of course, Cartter wanted to keep the new term fresh in his mind. At bedtime, he asked me “What was it called? Devil rite?” The following night, a discussion of favorite movies jarred his memory. On the topic of Shawshank Redemption, Danyelle said she agreed it was a very good film; she loved it except for that one scene. “Oh,” Cartter said, “Does it have Devil Rape?”
The Great Bambino
In truth, Cartter has always been the more relentless inquisitor of the two boys. It’s only been in the last year or so that Scotty has picked up the habit of refusing to go peacefully to bed at night, opting instead to mimic his older brother’s barrage of questions. With Cartter, asking question after question seems as involuntary as breathing.
Cartter was the one who started the movie conversation that ended up triggering his memory of the term “Devil Rape.” “What’s your favorite movie?” he demanded loudly at the kitchen table.
I said I couldn’t pick just one, but I could try for a list of five, one of which was Moneyball, the baseball drama about the 2002 Oakland Athletics’ improbable record-setting twenty-game win streak and the relatively miniscule payroll with which it was accomplished. I did such a good job outlining the film’s subject that both boys begged to watch it that night, and I gladly acquiesced.
Not fully up to speed on all the rules of the game, its lore, or the economics that govern professional teams’ operations, Cartter hardly stopped asking questions the entire time. He was particularly keen to blurt them out during the most dramatic sequences in the movie. I shushed him over and over, but not even after I told him “Shut up, Cartter,” did he stop.
It was 9:45 by the time the movie ended, and Danyelle and I quickly herded the kids into their beds. This was the night when I flipped out the lights and ignored all the boys’ questions like a defendant in a murder case getting mobbed by reporters. The question that Cartter kept on loudly repeating as I walked away was “What’s the curse of the Bambino!”
Butt-Wiper
Now that Cartter and Scotty are keen to sit around and talk with their mother and me at the kitchen table for long stretches, one of the topics that we probably visit too often is the obnoxiousness of the boy who lives across the street and his mother. I enjoy impersonating the child’s whiny entitled behavior and pretending to call for his mommy to wipe my butt. It’s true, even though Max is nine years old, his mother still wipes his butt for him. We know this not just because Jeannette follows her son into the men’s bathroom at the community pool – we know because she has loudly and angrily announced while mid-conversation with Danyelle out in her front yard, “Just go inside and poop, Max! I’ll come wipe your butt in a minute!”
This is a woman whom I find completely unacceptable, and her moronic and entitled behavior has clearly rubbed off on her son. Max is forever pouting and crying and jumping on Scotty and hitting him when the kids play together. He is greatly offended when he does not win or get whatever he wants, and it’s not hard to see where he gets it. Jeannette is the type of person who takes her four-year-old son to the nicest restaurant in town, an itty bitty dining room where my sister’s boyfriend is the manager, and when the child screams all through the evening, disrupting all the other diners’ meals, she refuses to remove him. So yes, I do indulge in mocking her and her older son in front of the kids. What’s more, I enjoy denying Jeannette when she comes around making demands.
One such occasion presented itself last Saturday. When the doorbell rang, I expected to find a group of kids asking for Cartter and Scotty, who were already out back in the park playing with the neighbor boys. About to be intimate with Danyelle, I was eager to send the little playmates on their way, so I tucked my manhood into the elastic band of my sweatpants and hustled to the door, intending to say simply, “They’re out back.” Instead, I saw Jeannette with her horrible little four-year-old urchin in her arms.
She wanted to pawn Max off on Danyelle and me, and she wanted to do it right that instant. Hendrix, the nasty little restaurant offender, had a swim lesson, which because Jeannette can’t drive, and because Jeannette must not leave Hendrix, required both her and her husband’s presence. I stood leaning out the cracked door with Sammy at my knee poking her nose out toward the stoop and sniffing.
Smiling and still strapped up in my waistband, I played dumb. “You’re going to the pool?” I said. When Jeannette repeatedly asked if we were going anywhere in the next hour, I hemmed and hawed and said, “I don’t know?” When she said she texted Danyelle, I said, “She’s in the shower.” It was with utter delight that I watched as she turned around and left, sighing bitterly in disgust as she waddled away.
Culinary Discoveries
Recovering from the stomach bug, Danyelle and I discovered the joy of Greek yogurt smoothies and later, cutlets in the air fryer. The cutlets, with just a little bit of oil, aren’t just less greasy, they’re more tender and delicious.
Cartter and Scotty have differing points of view on the Greek yogurt. I offered it to them with grapes one night, and Scotty, lover of simple things, was quite pleased. Cartter, though, made a disgusted face. The next morning his bout with the stomach bug began, and he told his mother, “Mommy, I know what made me throw up – the yogurt.” Translation: “Never offer me Greek yogurt again.”
Naturally, I enjoyed pulling out the yogurt a week or so later. I was making smoothies for the boys, and when Cartter saw the Fage appear on the counter, he said simply, “Oh no,” and then relished making a little matter-of-fact display about how disgusting Greek yogurt is. Turns out it’s not so disgusting blended up with banana, coconut water and frozen blueberries, a concoction which Cartter ended up attacking with fervent desire.
Blue Monk
On a Wednesday morning drive to school, Scotty informed Cartter and me that his music class was doing an exercise called “May Madness.” In this exercise, the class votes for their favorite jazz musician in tournament-style head-to-head matchups. Scotty informed me of who was winning, and my thought, which I expressed posthaste was “Your classmates don’t know shit. How are they supposed to decide?” a sentiment with which Scotty immediately agreed.
Apparently, the teacher plays snippets of a select piece of music, and these brief excerpts are supposed to be representative enough of the musician’s body of work for the wee eight-year-olds to make an informed decision about their preference. Riding in the rear driver side seat, sitting atop a booster, Scotty detailed some of the various battles already undergone, and in the telling, he had trouble pronouncing the name of one of the losers, “Thelonius Monk.”
Wanting to give Scotty a proper introduction, I pulled up an album on my phone as we came to a halt at the first stoplight on the crosstown, a light which we sit through at least twice every weekday morning. The album was Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane Live at Carnegie Hall, and I watched in the rearview mirror with satisfaction as Scotty perked up and donned his listening face at the pianist’s statement of the quirky opening melody in first piece, “Blue Monk.” The boy has always had an ear.
Ever since Scotty was a baby his taste in music has been wide-ranging and seemingly refined. I remember him shushing me at the kitchen table as a toddler while he listened intently to the music playing over the Sonos, standing next to the speaker in the living room trying to memorize melodies, performing fully choreographed ballet-style dances to the Dumbo and Winnie the Pooh soundtracks. When he was five, I remember driving him and his brother home from dinner when he commented on an obscure jazz tune “Mode for Joe” by Joe Henderson. “I like that song,” he said, and I remember when he requested an even more obscure and bizarre piece by Sun Ra, “You made a Mistake.” I can see him sitting in his desk chair doing nothing but gently swiveling back and forth while playing his favorite Vince Guaraldi numbers on his little CD player over and over. This weekend I’ll play him the whole album, my little Blue Monk.
The Raging Elitist 