My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #13, October, 1995

WHAT GENES HAVE WROUGHT

As my son and I were channel-surfing during a commercial, we passed through VH-1 playing a Phil Collins video, called "Two Hearts." Brian asked me whether any one of the many songs called "Two Hearts" happened to be about organ transplants. I told him I thought this unlikely. Staring thoughtfully out into space, he said, "I'll have to do something about that one of these days."

You now begin to see why I think of my son as a living refutation of solipsism. My imagination is good, but it's not THAT good.

For one thing, if I was going to imagine a son, how could I invent his taste for musical groups I never even heard of?

He has often compiled tapes of music he thinks I will like, or at least should like--you know, "Music To Pull Weeds By," or "Songs You'll Have To Like or Your Son Will Not Respect You"--that kind of thing. So I asked him to put together a tape of really pretty music for me.

I truly don't believe anyone else in the world would have put Nine Inch Nails on this tape. Or the Jack Rubys. Or Camper Van Beethoven's "Sweethearts" (their touching tribute to the absence of Ronald Reagan's brain).

Not that Brian was exactly wrong, here. Most of the songs were pretty. Or at the least, not ugly. But still...

To be sure, he also is startlingly like me in a number of ways. After all, I had 22 years to warp him in. Well, 16, anyway, after which he took on the responsibility of warping himself, not to mention warping me in return. For one thing, we both talk funny. We both routinely throw around allusions, and use words that are not part of the standard 10,000 word conversational vocabulary. A lot of people listen to him (and me) and say "Huh?"

He also thinks like me. Often we come up with the same joke at the same time, like when we saw a commercial about the urgent need to sell the remaining 1995 cars--"These cars have all got to GO!"--and we both had a mental image of a little automobile outhouse with a string of cars lined up outside.

Like me, he knows a whole lot about all kinds of different subjects. They're just different subjects than I know about, by and large. He knows math, for instance. I have to figure that the family math genes went sideways through me without ever stopping off to make my acquaintance. Ever since he was little, we had this working arrangement: when he needed to know what a word meant, he would ask me. When I needed something calculated--a tip, an earned run average, whatever--I would ask him and he would do it in his head.

We also have a kind of working partnership in shared knowledge. If we're trying to remember a particular book, for instance, I might say, "You know, the Cockroaches of something" and he'll say The Cockroaches of Stay More, by Donald somebody," and I'll say "Donald Harington."

I always told people that it was a good thing the kid read books, because if I had a kid who didn't read I would have had to drown him. I didn't really mean it, (mother love IS irrational, after all) but Brian was not all that convinced I was joking.

He got his letters down early, from me and Sesame Street. (When he was 14 months old, I took him to a party he was theoretically going to sleep through. Instead he wandered out into the kitchen and played with the magnetic letters on the refrigerator. From time to time, we would hear him cooing, in tones of pleased wonderment, "D--Daddy! C--Cat! O--Shit!") And after watching the words while I read to him, he figured out how to read when he was 3, and just kept going.

He would go on these obsessive learning binges, where for six months at a time he would find out everything there was to know about a subject. I'd check out books for him and let him go to it. Since he tended to be ruthlessly informative, I also ended up knowing a lot about his obsessions too, which has its benefits. I know a LOT more about geography than I did before he spent 6 months drawing maps of the United States and reciting state capitols at me, and I have been a whiz at interpreting Roman numerals ever since he went through his numbers obsession.

During his language binge, he committed entire polyglot dictionaries to memory. One of our cats came along at this point, and he wanted to call it "Pisica," the Rumanian word for cat. I told him I was not crazy about the thought of hollering "Here, Pisica, here Piss, Piss, Piss" out into the night when I wanted to summon her. He didn't understand this (he was only 5 at the time, and there were some fine points about language he had not grasped yet), but he was agreeable to calling it Kissa (Finnish for cat) instead.

But clearly one of the things that separates our thought patterns is the Y chromosome. He is a real laboratory for demonstrating fundamental differences between the genders. My first word was "mama." His first word was "choo-choo." Anything on wheels was "choo-choo," and it enthralled him. When I accidentally discovered where the bomb recipes were on the internet, my reaction was "Jeezus, what's this stuff doing out in public view!" His reaction, on the other hand, was "Neat!"

If I am lamenting the ways in which women are discriminated against, he is likely to be more impressed by the fact that women also live on average about 7 years longer than men--a more important form of discrimination, in his mind. Of course my feeling is that in large part this is because men do so many more really dumb things. (Do you think any sorority initiation rituals involve lying down on a white stripe in the middle of a major highway?)

And he argues. God, does he argue. No wonder the kid went to nationals in debate and extemporaneous speaking. This does have one good result; he pays a lot of attention to what I say; after all, you never can tell when my words will come in handy to be used against me.

So you see, if I was making up my child in my mind, he would not be what I would have come up with (I had a gut feeling I was going to have a little girl, for starters). On the other hand, he's a lot more fun than anything I would have imagined.

So when the issue of solipsism comes up, I say, no. I don't believe that I am capable of imagining him. I just enjoy him, I don't explain him.

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