Darling buds
The little red-haired kid had a new friend over to play. Both at the rotten weird age of 13, they’re stuck between kid and teenager and – unlike most girls of that age who are in a cheap perfume and tight top rush to grow up – still lumbering undecided over which is the more alluring.
(To add to his troubles, the red-haired kid has always been a sweet mass of contradictions, the kind of boy who will stop in the middle of a savage fistfight to help an old lady cross the street.)
Plus, there’s the strange experience of being a kid, and going over to somebody’s house for the first time – giving you welcome or creepy clues to their private life, as you catalogue their worth as friend material. You take in the smells in the hallway, posters on their bedroom wall, quality of the snacks, how they hold their own against brothers and sisters, how menacing their pets, whether their mom makes cookies and jokes or hollers drunk for a refill from the living room couch…
The most intriguing kids’ houses were invariably places of sorrow and mystery.
When my children bring friends home I’m on my best behaviour, and it’s usually pretty easy to size them up, make them laugh and feel welcome – provided, of course, they’re not of the prima donna type who barks orders at me and, when being picked up, rushes to her mother’s arms, frantic and tearful, ‘Mommy, mommy, SHE tried to make me eat ratatouille!’ ‘Shhh, princess, don’t you worry. You don’t ever have to come back here again.’ (Those kids, they get wrath and broccoli.)
So I watched as the red-haired kid’s friend came in, sussed out the place, sniffed the air and contributed the right number of shrugs to the whaddya wanna do debate. And, each time I forced them to scrape their eyes off the computer screen, I watched their agonised struggle with the kid vs. teen conundrum.
All suggested activities had to be weighed for coolness, and a single vote of lame was trump. So they boxed and rollerbladed, came back in to brag their blood and sweat; they ate mounds of cookies, drank all the juice, then got bored and came back to hover and be told what to do.
Why don’t you go have a water fight?
And over the next 30 seconds: their eyes lit up, great grins, backs straightened with strategies forming. Then doubt set in; they slouched, eyed each other, and mumbled, aw, I don’t know that’s kind of… You wanna? Do you? If you do. It could be okay. Holy crap, those pistols are huge! Two each. Oh, man, I want that one. Sweet!
Then zoom out to the garden, for an hour it was shouting and soaking and laughing their heads off – the artless thrill of abandon to kid, and its rules they know by heart.
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- And now that I’m all grown up and have kids of my own I wouldn’t hesitate a heartbeat to go out and have a water fight. Shoot, the lamer and more childlike the activity the more I seem to want to do it.
— Bryan Fillmer Apr 24, 9:45pm # - this is a beautiful post. I also remember the anxiety of having friends over, having to expose them to my parents’ off the wall sense of humor, their russian accent, our bizarre fridge full of “health food” (my mom would always say, if those friends of yours can’t understand the value of organic romaine lettuce ,they’re not worth it!), the five pianos in the house—it all felt impossible to explain to my perfectly contained friends who came from orderly homes and ate dinner at 6pm sharp. I wonder what happened to all those friends…after a while i gravitated toward friends whose homes were as much a mess as mine, and grew to feel comfortable in the ridiculous and unexplainable.
oh, and i meant to comment on the thank you notes. or rather, to thank you for writing thank you notes. an undervalued writing genre, i’m coming to realize.
— Julia Apr 26, 2:29am # - This was lovely. And perfectly titled!
— anne Apr 30, 3:42pm #
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