Oh boy ...

What a strange and terrific boy I have. He is jangly in his own "special" way -- some days flailing around like a puppet attached to someone else's strings. This must be his Pinocchio phase as he learns control and the difference between wrong and right. His great loves are Zina, weapons and reading anything ... and I mean anything printed in front of him.

I sat in on a first grade lunch this week and learned he has a special job in the school cafeteria. Xan is the designated fortune cookie reader -- no lie. He sits at the table closest to the recess door and small children file past him, passing him little strips of paper as they move on to the nirvana of afternoon recess. Being one of the very few first graders who can read fortune cookies has made him a veritable Dalli Lama to Mrs. Clark's first grade class. After he reads them, he lets the children know what they might mean and which ones will come true. Today the ones printed in blue were real and the red totally bogus.

Suddenly I have to be careful what kind of literature I leave lying around. For months we had a magazine in the little bathroom about buying cows for families in third world countries. It wast was full of innocuous pictures of bovines and chickens and fun to leaf through while sitting on the toilet. Last week, after spending 20 minutes or more in the potty, he came out with the magazine in hand, asking what a "gen-o-kid" was. And could he go to Uganda to be a part of the group of boys who got AK-47s when they were his same age. They even got to sleep outside for two years without any parents or school. The word was genocide.

He had found a story about a man who, as a boy, had been kidnapped at 6 to be a child soldier in Uganda. The boy was given a machine gun at 7 and killed at 8. What a world between these two boys. I tried to explain a little about war and that the boy in the story didn't want to be a child soldier. Xan had a hard time believing such nonsense. Literacy is an amazing thing. Even Zina in preschool reads better than many people will their whole lives.


Zina has a mind and wit that is all her own. After I said something about how well she gets along with her brother, she said without blinking an eye, "It's like we have an indivisible cloak."
Her other joke is about a "flock of girls" being a "herd of hers". She likes the sound of things and has started matching pitch. She will find a note on the piano and say it "rhymes" with certain other sounds like the note an octave above or the squeak of Marks truck.


Children are strange in between people. (How un-PC is it to have a first grader that supports child slavery in sub-Saharan African civil warfare?) The box feels small for the big personalities of my little people.


Maybe the face only a mother could love.