My aunt and uncle on my mother's side are visiting for the next few days, and they have brought their four-year-old grandson with them: this was the good part of today. He is a reading child, incredibly verbal; I was delegated to keep an eye on him and keep him entertained. The latter proved to be entirely unnecessary, since he is capable of conjuring up anything out of nothing.
His grandmother and grandfather call him T, but he explains gravely to me that his real name is Tristan. "I don't tell everyone." He is tall for his age, with silky brown hair and very dark lashes; either he will grow up beautiful or he will hate his face for most of his adolescence, but right now he dances and bounces and bobs and has developed a 1960's model's stance, hipshot, one arm akimbo, head tilted back to look adults in the face, which he might have picked up from anywhere: he assimilates words and cultural references ferociously, although he does not always produce them in intelligible order. "That commercial. With the alligator. Do you remember? The best part was where the chef threw knives at the ratatouille." He is being taught to call me "Aunt Sonya," because it's the nearest uncomplicated relationship—we are probably some kind of cousins-by-marriage once or twice removed; his mother is my aunt's daughter—but he insisted on referring to me for the entire evening as his friend. "Where's my friend? Where is she?" He makes booklets out of folded leaves of paper, crayon-illustrated, which he calls his books. He is not impressed by mine, because I only wrote them. The first one he showed me depicts a piece of logic straight out of The Little Prince: a sort of greenish helmet-shape, which he explains is a winged turtle; the wings are not visible because the turtle is at rest, they are folded up inside its shell for safekeeping. ("My drawing was not a picture of a hat . . .") The next page is the greenish helmet with spiky red lines falling out of it: "This is the inside of the turtle. That's his blood running through him." It's not a dead turtle; it's an anatomical drawing. He wants books on dragons so he can draw them properly. "They're not on the Wildlife Channel." And from somewhere equally nebulous, he has picked up politics—walking into the living room, he asks me, "Did you know our president is evil? The city flooded and he was supposed to build houses, but he only built a few and then he left. I wish I were president. I would build all the houses. Do you know his name? It's Bush." Or he shows me the soft-footed walk he has been practicing, because someone let him watch a Western: "Indians walk like this. Quietly. Quietly. They have to move so the cowboys don't see them. They know the cowboys hate them."
He palms a geometric plastic shape into the air and tells me, "This is the key that unlocks the hidden door. You can come with me," before he mimes opening a door in the air about knee-height, which he then crawls through on his stomach: because hidden doors are not meant for just anyone to pass through. If in ten years he isn't doing theater, I will be very surprised.
His grandmother and grandfather call him T, but he explains gravely to me that his real name is Tristan. "I don't tell everyone." He is tall for his age, with silky brown hair and very dark lashes; either he will grow up beautiful or he will hate his face for most of his adolescence, but right now he dances and bounces and bobs and has developed a 1960's model's stance, hipshot, one arm akimbo, head tilted back to look adults in the face, which he might have picked up from anywhere: he assimilates words and cultural references ferociously, although he does not always produce them in intelligible order. "That commercial. With the alligator. Do you remember? The best part was where the chef threw knives at the ratatouille." He is being taught to call me "Aunt Sonya," because it's the nearest uncomplicated relationship—we are probably some kind of cousins-by-marriage once or twice removed; his mother is my aunt's daughter—but he insisted on referring to me for the entire evening as his friend. "Where's my friend? Where is she?" He makes booklets out of folded leaves of paper, crayon-illustrated, which he calls his books. He is not impressed by mine, because I only wrote them. The first one he showed me depicts a piece of logic straight out of The Little Prince: a sort of greenish helmet-shape, which he explains is a winged turtle; the wings are not visible because the turtle is at rest, they are folded up inside its shell for safekeeping. ("My drawing was not a picture of a hat . . .") The next page is the greenish helmet with spiky red lines falling out of it: "This is the inside of the turtle. That's his blood running through him." It's not a dead turtle; it's an anatomical drawing. He wants books on dragons so he can draw them properly. "They're not on the Wildlife Channel." And from somewhere equally nebulous, he has picked up politics—walking into the living room, he asks me, "Did you know our president is evil? The city flooded and he was supposed to build houses, but he only built a few and then he left. I wish I were president. I would build all the houses. Do you know his name? It's Bush." Or he shows me the soft-footed walk he has been practicing, because someone let him watch a Western: "Indians walk like this. Quietly. Quietly. They have to move so the cowboys don't see them. They know the cowboys hate them."
He palms a geometric plastic shape into the air and tells me, "This is the key that unlocks the hidden door. You can come with me," before he mimes opening a door in the air about knee-height, which he then crawls through on his stomach: because hidden doors are not meant for just anyone to pass through. If in ten years he isn't doing theater, I will be very surprised.
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