Until he was eleven
years old, my son was raised primarily by my mother, who lived
with us. But that didn't mean I had no influence on him. I did.
And I'm not sure it was a good thing.
I think about his four-year-old
kindergarten year. He was in a small private school and his teacher
was straight out of college and full of child-development theories.
She was deeply concerned, for example, that Johnny had poor small-motor
skills. She called me in for a conference.
Hearing "small-motor
skills," I immediately thought of motorcycles as compared to cars,
but it turned out she wasn't worried about his potential with
a Harley. She said he didn't work well with his hands. I was astonished.
Even at four, he could take a handful of teeny-tiny Lego pieces
and produce a fort or a car, something I still can't do. But his
printing was a disaster, she said. I was concerned about her diagnosis
until I mentioned it in a letter to one of my college English
teachers, a woman of great intelligence. She wrote back, "Hummph.
I'm 82 and I never had any small-motor skills. It never hurt me."
I suddenly knew what she meant – her handwriting was terrible
– and so was mine. Johnny had obviously inherited my poor penmanship.
The second kindergarten
incident had little to do with my influence, but clearly upset
his teacher. Told to draw a self portrait, Johnny had produced
a picture of a boy with two heads. I tried to calm down his teacher
with a reference to two heads being better than one, but she was
having none of it, so I promised to try to get to the bottom of
it.
That night, I asked
Johnny why he'd drawn himself with two heads. "Oh," he said with
the logic of a child, "I didn't like the way the first one came
out, so I tried a second time."
The next episode centered
on the family curse. I don't mean we were cursed; I mean the way
we cursed others. It started with my father, and I have no idea
if he originated it or was quoting something. But when he was
pretending to be angry at someone, he would say, "May all your
children be acrobats." I have no idea why acrobatic children are
a curse, but it amused me and, on occasion, I used it. One day
in school, Johnny got very angry at a classmate and burst out
with the curse. "He says such funny things," his teacher told
me at our next conference.
Then there was the
matter of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." I was a great fan
of Allen Sherman and often sang his parodies in the car. My favorite
was the "Ballad of Harry Lewis." Set to the tune of the "Battle
Hymn of the Republic," it was about Harry Lewis who worked for
Irving Roth in the fabric industry and included an immortal pun
found in the second verse. Apparently I sang it too often, because
when his teacher decided to teach the four-year-olds the "Battle
Hymn of the Republic," Johnny informed her she had the wrong words
and regaled the class with the entire Allen Sherman's version.
The climax came, however,
when the teacher decided to take the class on a tour of Jacksonville
University, where I was director of public relations. I made arrangements
to conduct the tour myself and, at the appointed hour, we set
off. It was (and is) a pretty campus, and all went well until
we got to the building where the pottery students worked. For
reasons that have never been clear to me, Johnny was terrified
of the potters' wheels. I quietly took him outside and waited
for the others to finish looking around the room. When they came
out, his teacher took me aside and asked why I'd taken Johnny
outside. I explained that he'd been frightened of the potters'
wheels.
"Oh," she said, "you
must make him face his fears."
I guess I'd had one
too many of her theories, because I blurted out, "Now, listen,
honey. I'm 40 years old and I have plenty of fears I haven't faced.
He can wait till he's six to get over being afraid of potters'
wheels. As a matter of fact, he can go through his entire life
without confronting potters' wheels."
Come to think of it,
he has.
