A selfish perk of parenting is getting to watch lessons and strategies that apply specifically to you, absorbed and expressed unfiltered by someone with infinitely less baggage than you bring to things yourself. In effect, from a very early age kids give you advice on how to live, advice that for its innocent implication or expression is somehow more hearable.
The kid's interests are catholic but skew categorically to music and sugar, to screaming for fun and throwing things, to Shrek and eggs and never going to sleep.
Subject also displays avid interest in garage doors.
For a while he would demand that I push the button, and each time he'd give a jump as the door engaged. Now, like everything (piloting a jet, open heart surgery, killing someone bare handed) he wants to do it himself.
Grandma and Peepaw have prime double garage doors, which open onto a tree-lined block filled with quiet autumn light so distilled and savory as to seem flown in from another country as a super-secret upper-middle-class suburban perk. The doors, the aura and smell of the garage are imbued with grandparent magic, characteristics of a fairy-tale world already remembered later in life as experienced now, in a kind of reverse déjà vu.
Saturday we were at it again, me the holder at switch-height, him opening and closing those vaunted doors. This time you could see a new thread: the boy was trying to conquer his fear. Each time he would push the button, each time giving a jump when the door engaged. Each time too, though, the jump would get less pronounced.
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