The perfect age might be 4.
In my mind’s eye I see my son lying on the thin blue rug in his grandparents’ basement play room, one arm bent under one ear, the other arm occupied with the toy truck we bought him earlier in the day at a garage sale for 15 cents.
He talked to the truck, part of a running dialogue of a world inhabited by “mean” toys and “nice” toys.
He spent a lot of time on the floor. It was his space, his Middle Earth, where characters came and went, where imagined friends were saved and lost, and where, occasionally, one of its populace—usually a “mean guy”—“got died.” No, the perfect age probably is 7.
By now, he’s old enough to know who the president is, can make a tuna sandwich all on his own, can catch most of what I throw to him in our backyard games, but has the charming habits of a second grader.
We’re in the ballpark at San Francisco, walking on the concourse. “Daddy, where are the bloody seats?”
“Bloody seats?”
“The ones way up high.”
Pause.
“Oh, you mean the nosebleed section.”
But wait; surely the perfect age is 9.
He falls into a chair, a jumble of joints. And when he gets out, his limbs reassemble and unfold, and I can imagine him one day when he is, say, 17, looking down at me, bemused, remembering when he was little and I wasn’t.
But he isn’t 17, he is 9, and although his unhinging body hints at future jump shots from the baseline, I can still haul him around on my back for a minute or two, grabbing his big toe like a clasp and pulling his ankles into my ribs.
Will I remember how that felt?
I’m told the bad years are coming, the Tweens and the Teens. Acne and girls and music we hate and that look he will give us when we speak to his friends when we’re supposed to just be quiet and try our best not to be an embarrassment. And then it won’t be “Daddy”; it will be “Daaaaaad” in the most annoying tone he can muster, no doubt deserved because of my poorly managed dadness. Can’t wait.
He has this green embroidered blanket he sleeps with. We wrapped him in it on his first day home from the hospital. Now it’s stained, threadbare, falling apart. I’m guessing it will be another item of childhood that gets left behind soon. If it’s still in one piece, maybe it will go to college with him, more memento than companion. He’ll be 18. And that will be the perfect age, too—along with every other one, before and after.
