At school, some football boys had told him that he was short, so he came to tell us sulkingly. “Nonsense,” I told him. “Don’t worry about anything.”
I think he’s quite big actually, with long legs and feet that can almost be called bony. Feet I haven’t touched in days.
In the early years I knew everything. I caught him before he fell. I woke up before he called. I watched the tantrum approach as he quietly played with his Lego.
But then suddenly, it’s spring, he’s in fourth grade and on vacation, he doesn’t like Minecraft anymore, he called his dad ‘bro’ the other day when he came to wish him good night, he gets called after by girls and reacts incredibly cool to that , he meticulously decides which book he wants to read before going to sleep, so that he will not have nightmares. I can’t put my finger on why he suddenly thinks about things so differently. When I recently talked to him about life, I behaved much too solemnly. I thought he’d like that, as a kind of initiation rite on the way to adulthood, but he looked at me as if I was flapping my sleeves like a delirious Professor Dumbledore.
And there’s the brother and sister, of course, younger than him. They constantly have hot-tempered anecdotes to tell, the nose drips with exertion, about eating yogurt and that Bobbi had fallen off the jungle gym. One of the two pretends to hold a phone all the time and has a business conversation, using only the words ‘hello’ and a very firm ‘no’. While we laugh I see him cowering in the background, embarrassing this, I’m just Donald Duck reading, you morons.
So the two of us went on a day trip. He grabs my hand anyway, we’re going to have breakfast on the top floor of the Bijenkorf. “Deluxe shoes, deluxe bag, deluxe vase,” he mutters admiringly to himself in the various departments. He eats a piece of chocolate cake. Not a crumb goes wrong. His eyes dart back and forth, he sees a strange plant, a lady with the same hair as the strange plant, a spoon on the floor. I decide not to ask him anything today and not to rush him.
We walk through narrow streets. We buy a burgundy red boater’s cap and a pair of square caramel colored sunglasses. With his hands in his pockets, he has relaxed conversations with the staff in stores, looking like a combination between the young Lennon and a figure Jan, Jans and the Children. Mannequins, he tells me as we cross a busy pedestrian crossing, he finds real horror, even without a face or head. “Who comes up with something like that!” he suddenly exclaims. In a comic book store he is endlessly leafing through a Japanese comic. “With manga you start at the back,” he explains to me.
He drinks bubble tea in the rain under a front. It’s cold, his cheeks and hands are icy, but he slurps unperturbed. Next to us, an old Asian woman is sheltering from the rain in a jacket and a small bag of groceries. “Just like Grandma Josephine”, we say at the same time, although he never consciously knew my Indian grandmother.
In the warm restaurant he takes mouse bites from his dumpling and wants to know how to put down the fork and knife when you’ve finished eating. Suddenly he begins to softly sing ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ in his clear, high-pitched voice. He still knows the whole tune by heart, eleven pipers piping, six geese a laying. I’m not even surprised anymore.
Then we go to a tourist light show based on Dalí’s works in a large factory hall, which gives you goosebumps despite yourself. He does not admire in silence, but with all his possessions he goes into the shapes, lights, colors and music of Pink Floyd. Around him, other kids his age dance and crawl, in the same clumsy, unself-conscious, wonderful way.
Then I see: the others are indeed much longer. But oh, how great he is.