...if you can call this living.

No totally original content right now, sorry.

This is from a letter I just wrote to my dear friend Lesley:

But, ah, Whit! The boy is early in his second month of K-3 Montessori and seems to be already able to consistently color within the lines – a skill I didn’t really master until the 1st grade – and he counted to eight in Spanish last week just to impress his grandma Karon (my mom)(he’s going to a bilingual Montessori). And we’re starting to have some odd conversations, mostly accidentally initiated by me. I was making the covers for some of the CDs included herein (and about which, more later). ‘What are those?’ he asked.

‘Um, they’re pictures of explosions that some scientists made.’

‘Why?’ I love this question with a passion called hate – the Buddhist in me is pleased to have to reconsider things I would have ordinarily responded ‘Because’ to, but the rational adult in me becomes quickly frustrated with this game. ‘Um, because they tried to do something kind of exciting and they wanted to be able to show everyone they did it.’

‘Why?’

Geez, I always get myself into this sort of jam. I’m studiously avoiding using the word ‘bomb’ here, because I don’t want to have to explain how people use bombs in wars to kill lots of other people. I already inadvertently got into ‘wars’ the other day because Lynn and I were griping (as we often do) in an aside about our government’s disastrous Mideast adventure and feeling sorry for the people there when Whit, overhearing us, started asking questions about war and if all the people who were being killed were bad people and why do people kill each other and stuff like that.

Three years old is a probably a little young to have stuff like that explained to you, so Lynn and I turned to a time-tested technique: distraction. ‘Hey, Whit, should we blow up some balloons?’

We did, and we were saved.

I’ve (probably not surprisingly) found myself explaining that, yes, Hank the cat WILL get older and that someday, he will die, and so will everything living. How do I get myself into these messes? I have this problem where I just can’t fib to the boy – and I probably won’t be able to do so to the girl either. I remember every time an adult told me something that was a fib (most notably my mom telling me that if you left mustard out all day, you could get mustard sickness and die if you ate it – it wasn’t until sometime post-college that I figured out the inherent untruth of that) and am still boggled by the way those statements stuck with me. Oh, sure, a lot of what my folks told me is dead-on true (like that smoking is bad for you – despite the fact that they both [still, I think] smoke), but I’m always taken aback when I discover the little untruths.

So I work hard to always tell the truth – both to the kids and most people I meet. This why people who innocently ask me ‘how’s it going?’ or ‘how are you?’ frequently receive a litany of my current woes.

This is probably an unexpected result for people who are just trying to make small talk.