Inessential Stuff

This is my boy, Marcus.  He is five and a half years old.

He loves animals and insects, no matter how ugly or strange.  Sometimes, it seems, the uglier and stranger, the better, so his favorites include bats, armadillos, and platypuses.  Yet he appreciates that the kestrel must eat the sparrow to survive, and that the sparrow must eat the ant.  And he loves the ant.  The sparrow, too, and the kestrel.  He especially loves the ant.

We walk hand-in-hand to the Spokane Arena to watch a hockey game together.  He wants to know if Everett will be the opponent.  I say no, Vancouver.  He says, too bad.  He likes Everett’s uniforms.  And I think back to last year when we saw Everett play.  Then he goes on, “At least when they wear their green shirts with the green helmets.  I don’t like white jerseys as much,” he says, accessing memories two years old.  “They wear white helmets with those.”

A nightmare disturbs his sleep.  He asks to be hugged in the morning.  He tells me that he is sad, so we talk about other things.  That afternoon, after preschool, while talking about the day––painting and pizza for snack––he says to me, “Daddy, you know what’s funny?” and he says “funny” as in “peculiar” or “worthy of pondering.”  I ask him what.  “It’s funny,” he says, “how I spend more time thinking about the bad things than the good.”

He is sick, his fever breaking, and he has no energy, and he lays on my chest.  I play some soft music for him, “The Weepies”, a sad song called “The World Spins Madly On” and he is warm against my body, and I love being able to hold him and rub his back.  Then he says to me, in a froggy, groggy voice, “These words don’t make sense.”  “What do you mean?” I ask.  “It says the world spins madly on.  But the world doesn’t spin madly, like this,” and he lifts up his body so he can demonstrate, and he spins his fingers around, “or we would all fall off.”  He lays back down.  “At first,” he continues, “I thought it said, ‘And the world spins magically on’.”  His throat is thick with illness, and every word is an effort, but he lifts himself back up to look me in the eyes.  “That makes more sense.  Because it spins around and around and no one is pushing it, like magic.”  He puts his head back on my shoulder.  I rub his back.  It has started to snow outside.