Tonight it was just Miles and me. He's a great kid. So smart and sweet and funny, with his freckles and his mop hair and utterly earnest conversation. I took the air-conditioner out of his room, making him hold onto Jasper while I set it in the unfinished half of the attic. I don't want the cat back there because he's not the brightest crayon in the box and that side is full of insulation. Also, he could just climb the wall and be in the other side of the duplex, where my landlords and their baby live. With their dog. It would be very bad for Jasper, but he is simple and does not know that. Until tonight I am pretty sure he had no idea there even was a door leading to another place in the house. He was meowing and writhing, tail twitching, just wanting to leap, but my son kept him in check. I had a one minute window before the AC was set down and the door closed again. In the meantime Jasper got very mad. When Miles set him down he lunged and snapped his jaws and actually made a short barking sound. It was kind of funny so we laughed at him. He thinks he is a giant fearsome beast, but actually, we can roll him up in a rug just like an angry cat burrito.
After that I plunked down on my son's bed, scoping out all the weird angles in his room. Taking in what he sees, the angles of his private thoughts. He started going through his stuffed animals. Organizing. Just like his mama. About a week ago we had jumped in the car to check out a post I found on Craigslist where someone was giving away the rest of an estate sale in a decent neighborhood. I had never just jumped into my car for something like that, but I was looking for two kitchen chairs. I found them. They once belonged to an elderly Jewish woman named Roberta. I know because I picked up a paperback copy of Flowers for Algernon, and her name was inside the cover. I also got some sewing stuff, a few large jars with lids, a pair of shredding scissors, a screwdriver set and a saw. I also found a picture I framed and put in my kitchen and a M.A.S.H mug from the 80's. Miles found a glass cork top jar to put his marbles in, a tie rack and a big basket that looks exactly like it should have a snake in it.
And that's what he was doing, as I was draped on his bed with our ridiculous barking cat, looking at the angles. He was searching his toy box for his three wooden snakes and his two bean bag snakes, so he could put them in the basket. He told me the story of almost every stuffed animal. Sometimes with a voice like, "This used to me very important to me. Oh, long ago, you are so far away..." Which is funny to me, because he is ten. But his ten-ness feels different to him than it feels to me. In another ten he will be twenty. I have a concept of twenty, but he does not. I know, when he is twenty, he will have very different things in his box. But to him, there is no other box. Not yet.
Instead, in this box, there is a pale green dinosaur. He pulled it out and looked at it and told me in a very sad voice, "I took this to school for show and tell, and then I took it outside for recess, and some kids offered to babysit all the stuffed animals but they accidentally dropped mine in the mulch a few times." His voice was sad. And what made me sad was this thought, "I don't know this dinosaur." I had never seen it before. Or at least, never really noticed it. It was important to my son, important enough to take to school, but not important enough for me to find it on the couch, or move it around the house, or leave it on the steps for Miles to take up to his room. So I offered to vacuum it up. I took it downstairs and tried to suck the tiny mulch bits out of the fur, which was difficult because they were pretty stuck. Mostly I picked them off with my fingernails. It took half an hour. And while I was cleaning up the dinosaur I was thinking, damn, my son is closer to the age where he will no longer care about keeping stuffed animals than he is to the age when I used to scoop him up and nurse him. I cleaned that dinosaur like crazy. I noticed the hell out of it.
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