Two..... Matthew

    I read a lot of child development books when I was a new dad, and one of the most surprising assertions was that the earliest communication and nurturing of your child is the most important because a child’s personality traits are pretty much set for life by their sixth birthday. Which made Monica and me nervous for a number of reasons, but mainly because even during those early formative years, Matthew was very often full of crap. 

    

We were lucky to have a preschool at the Lutheran church just down the road from us. The kids learned all their numbers and letters before kindergarten there and performed in musical pageants for parents and grandparents. They learned how to be students, and how to interact with teachers and the other kids. Some of the friends Matt made in preschool are still among his dearest.

It was a small school with just a handful of students, so the kids got plenty of attention from the teachers and volunteers. Matt loved it and would recount his day to me when I picked him up from daycare after work. 

 

    “Pastor Abby let me go up in the steeple and pull the rope that rings the bell today,” Matt told me. 

 

    “Really?” I asked, impressed. “Is that something she lets anyone do?” 

 

    “Yep,” he said. “Everybody takes turns doing it, she has a calendar for it. Today was my day.” 

 

    “So what’s it like?” I asked. 

 

    “Really loud, like boom-bonga-boom really loud. Every time you pull the rope, it’s so loud it hurts your ears. Your head goes ‘blrrrzzz’ inside even when you’re done.” 

 

    That was a little disturbing. But there were about twenty kids in the preschool, so if Pastor Abby had a calendar to rotate them all through for bell ringing, that would mean my kid wouldn’t be subjected to ear damage more than about once a month. Still, I decided to ask about it. 

 

    When I saw her next, I said, “I’ll bet it’s great fun for the kids to go up in the steeple to ring the bell every day.” 

 

    Pastor Abby looked at me quizzically. “Our church doesn’t have a bell,” she said. 

 

    Later, I confronted Matthew by telling him what the pastor had told me. He blinked. “She should probably go look for it, then” he said. 

 

    He entertained me with another awkward fabrication not long after. Because his preschool let out at lunch, one of the daycare ladies would drive just past the cornfield to the church to pick up the kids. “Was it Margaret or was it Mary that got you kids today?” I asked Matthew. 

 

    “Neither of them did,” he told me. “Today, Tripp took us.” 

 

    Tripp was one of his classmates. “How does that work?” I asked. “Tripp is four years old. How did he get a driver’s license?” 

 

    “He doesn’t need one. Tripp has a motorcycle.” 

 

    “So he got eight of you onto a motorcycle?” 

 

    “No. He made trips. That’s why he’s named Tripp.” 

 

     My parenting books said that experimenting and exercising one’s imagination is a natural and healthy part of a child’s early development. It was important though to listen, gently and nonjudgmentally, and to guide your child lest they confound what’s real with fantasy. So when he was a kindergartner and he told me they had a guest teacher that day because “Miss Hummel got her truck impounded,” I asked for clarification. 

 

    “Is that true,” I asked, gently and nonjudgmentally, “or did you just pull that out of your butt?” 

 

    Matthew beamed. “I pulled it straight out of my butt,” he said. 

 

     With Matt in kindergarten, according to my parenting books, time was running short to mold Matthew’s personality before it set for life. Whatever becomes of a kid with such a cheerful, yet casual relationship to facts and a penchant for embellishment? He becomes a criminal, I worried, or maybe a writer. 

 

    But making things up wasn’t all Monica and I had to worry about. We suspected that Matthew entertained impulsive behavior more often than his classmates, fears that were confirmed at an open house with a display of second graders’ classwork pinned onto a bulletin board. Apparently, it had been principal appreciation week (I hadn’t known there was such a thing) and the teacher had told her students to draw pictures of the school’s principal, and to write a few lines of gratitude by way of a personal message below it. 

 

    The texts were penciled block letters that mostly said things like, “Dear Mrs. Berry, We love you!” or “You are the best principal ever, Mrs. Berry!” and the drawings were invariably of a stick-figured woman with curly shoulder-length hair, smiling brightly and holding flowers or waving cheerily. Like any proud parents would, we scanned the bulletin board for the poster with our kid’s name on it. 

 

     “Oh, my,” Monica said when she found it. It wasn’t like the others. Matthew’s stick-woman was seated on a chair in front of a desk, her hands on a keyboard and staring at a computer monitor. The text below it read, 'Dear Mrs. Berry. I know what you do in the office. I am there a lot.' 

 

    “Well,” I said, “the upside, is uh, that doesn’t look like embellishment. That poster looks like the work of a kid with keen observation skills.” 

 

    “It does,” Monica said. “And that’s your upside?” 

 

     Even so, Mrs. Berry told us that Matt was one of her favorite students and that his visits to her office usually brightened her day. She recounted one to me when I saw her at a soccer game. 

 

    “Matt came to visit me again today,” she said. 

 

    “Oh, no,” I groaned. 

 

    “I was busy when he came in, so he went straight to his corner and got himself a book.” 

 

    “Why was he there?”

 

    “I asked him, when I got off the phone,” she said. “A couple girls in his class had tied their shoelaces together. When they stood up, Matthew tipped them over onto the grass.” 

 

    “I’m sorry,” I said. “We’ll talk to him.” 

 

    “Oh, I know,” Mrs. Berry said. “But it was kind of funny when I talked to him about it.” 

 

    “Funny how?” 

 

    “Well, when I asked him why he’d been sent to my office, without even looking up from his book he grumbled, ‘Olivia and Zoey tied their shoes together.  I tipped them over’ “

 

    "And I said, ‘Yes, Matthew. The playground monitor told me. Why did you push them over?'

 

    "He kept reading. ‘Their shoes were tied together,’ he said. 

 

    “I thought he was being evasive, so I asked again. ‘Matthew, I want you to look at me and explain why-' and here I spaced and emphasized my words, 'why you.. pushed them.. over.'" 

 

    "He put his book down and sighed as if more explanation was tiresome, furrowed his eyebrows at me, and spacing his words similarly said, 'Their shoes.. were tied.. together.'

 

    "Then he picked his book up again, raised his eyebrows, and stared at me.

 

    " 'Oh,' I said. 'Their shoes were tied together.'

 

    'Exactly,' he said, and went back to reading his book."

 

    "He said 'exactly' to you?" I asked.

 

    "Exactly," Mrs. Berry said. "Made my day."

 

    Monica and I often worried that the molding we subjected Matthew to was being outpaced by the acceptance he was imposing onto us. Even so, Matt eventually moderated and tamed his impulsiveness on his own, and his personality locked in (if that’s what it really did) to make him a relatively pleasant young human. 

 

    Matt and I get along pretty well, especially on hikes or trips together. We just understand each other, or something.  During the pandemic, when Matt’s school went to online classes, the two of us took a road trip to explore homelessness. I thought an immersive experience would be educational for Matthew and possibly foster more understanding and empathy. Matt thought it would be a hoot. 

 

    “First thing we do is we push shopping carts together and tie plastic bags all over them to make ourselves a shelter,” he said, excited about the prospect. 

 

    “I was thinking of just parking the truck at a Walmart and sleeping in the canopy,” I said. 

 

    “Not me. I’m going whole hog on it. I’ll get some cardboard too for sleeping on. They’ll have a big cardboard squisher thingy in the back. It’ll be awesome.” 

 

     “Hmm,” I said. 

 

    Five hundred miles south of home, we pulled into a Walmart parking lot, and it wasn’t difficult to find the ‘homeless section’.  We stopped next to a forty-year-old, loose paneled RV with a spiderwebbed windshield and duct taped side windows. The store’s street sweeper had been detouring round it long enough that a grimy berm had been built up, like a curving property line. Inside the line, a greasy, stubbled guy was sitting on the asphalt and leaning back on one of the RV’s flat tires. I noticed that he hadn’t thought of, or maybe just hadn’t the inclination to get himself any cardboard to sit on from the big squisher thingy out back. A dozen or so other people sat or scuffed between questionably drivable vehicles scattered around the parking lot. 

 

     Cars, vans, and RV’s, most of them with cardboard or trash bags wedged up against their windows, so we couldn’t see if anyone was inside them. Except for the driver’s side window on a silvery-gray or possibly once-blue Chevy Cutlass. Two drooly pit bull snouts snuffled and slobbered their enthusiasm to us over the barely lowered window.  The car bounced and rocked slightly side to side. 

 

     “Here’s home!” exclaimed Matthew. 

 

     I was contemplating the value of deep understanding and empathy.  Re-evaluating just how immersive this experience needed to be.  

 

    “The hell it is,” I said. “We’re not staying here.” 

 

    “I am. Look, there’s a rack for shopping carts and there’s none in it. That’s a great start for my shelter. I’ll need to find some string or something to tie cardboard up to it.” 

 

    “Whatever. We’re camping at the state park.” 

 

    Matt’s enthusiasm was undimmed. “That could be fun for you,” he said. “You can leave me here.” 

 

    “I’m not leaving a sixth-grader out- well, out here by himself,” I told him. “It doesn’t look safe.” 

 

    “The store is open all night. If you’re worried, just leave me a bunch of money and I can like, go inside and buy something whenever I want.” 

 

    “I don’t think leaving you alone with money out here would make it any safer. Let’s go get a hamburger.” 

 

    While we were waiting in the drive-thru line, his wristwatch alarm went off again. “Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.” Sixty seconds later it stopped, then started up again. 

 

    “It does that every day. Why does it keep doing that?” I asked. 

 

    “It’s ‘cause I have two of them.” He showed me the two watches he was wearing, stacked on his wrist. 

 

    “What? Why?” 

 

    “Well, this one,” he said, pointing to the lower one, “I set for 4:12, so I could tell if the school bus was late letting me off at home every day. But then I was messing around with it and one of the buttons popped off and now I can’t shut it off, so it beeps now for a full minute every day at 4:12.” 

 

    “But now you have two of them.” 

 

    “Yeah. So then I went on Mom's Amazon and got the exact same watch again, and I set this one,” pointing to the other watch, “for 4:13 because Nicole the bus driver doesn’t like it when my watch goes off on the bus, especially after I couldn’t turn it off. So I set this one for 4:13, when I’m supposed to be off the bus and at the mailbox.” 

 

    “So it only goes off on the bus if you’re dropped off late.” 

 

    “Right. But then I was wondering if the first watch was like a lemon or something, so I was fiddling around with the buttons on this new one to see if it was any better and then a button popped off it just like it did on the old one. Now I can’t turn the alarm off on this one either, so it goes off and beeps for a minute every day too.” 

 

    “So why are you wearing both of them?” 

 

    “Because. Now this new one has a button off it and goes off just like my old one does, which means the old one is just as good as this new one. So I can’t throw the old one away now, can I?” 

 

    “It’s amazing how much sense that makes,” I said. 

 

     Matt didn’t catch the sarcasm. “Right, see? And because they are equal, I have to wear both of them.” 

 

    “Huh. Well, that’s just some kind of-“ I was going to say stupid, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t not stupid for sure, but it sounded too much like something I would do. Change a few particulars, drop in ‘truck’ and ‘Craigslist’ for ‘watch’ and ‘Amazon’ and the story goes a long ways towards explaining the hulks parked in my driveway. 

 

    “-genius,” I finished. 

 

    “I know, right? Nicole thinks it’s stupid, though.”