DadaMama: This Boy

He is six years old, almost six and a half. His hair is spiky and his shoes are scuffed in that very particular way that shoes scuff when you spend half your day kicking holes in the dirt. There is a handful of freckles scattered across his nose, and he is missing one bottom tooth. He knows the things a first-grader knows: 2+2=4, cat is spelled C-A-T, and dinosaurs are extinct. He knows that it isn't nice to call names or talk with your mouth full or snatch toys from your little brother. He is six years old, and still fresh. If you look carefully, the baby he was is still there just beneath the surface of the boy he is; vibrant, melodramatic, wreathed with an air of studied bravado.

Today he wandered around the block with his friend. Around the block is a forbidden place; the great unknown. I expect it's very much like our side of the block, but because it's out of eyesight and earshot, the boy is not allowed to go.

The boy thinks this is unfair. The boy thinks he is bigger, stronger and smarter than his parents. He has the small boy's tendency to think that nothing and no one will hurt him. I wish that was true.

This afternoon, the boy's little brother came in and said that the boy was playing with a kid he didn't know, a kid with a brown football. The boy's father slipped out the door to find him. The boy returned dirty and crying, walking the walk of shame just behind his father. It seems that there was a football game on that side of the block, and that the sixth graders running the game bullied him, seeing him as nothing more than fresh meat to cut their teeth on.

The boy had been tripped. He'd fallen to the pavement and landed hard on his knee. His elbow was skinned. When he stood up, the sixth graders invited him to punch the kid who'd tripped him. The boy knew this to be wrong--both his parents have told him not to hit. So the boy walked away.

He walked away. This was an act of bravery that left him shaking, breathless and terrified. I cannot tell you what it cost him; I can only tell you that I am so very proud of him.

I look again at this boy; grubby, disheveled, tears smeared across his face. I see that his lip is quivering and his ears are red, and notice how his shoulder blades look like fragile broken wings under his brown t-shirt. He is so small, so defenseless, I feel that I should scoop him up and cradle his head against my neck, like I used to do when he was a baby. But I cannot stop the press of time, the years hurtling forward and away from all of us. I look again at this boy and I see the man he is becoming.