from the mouths of babes

Three days a week I tutor an adorable 5-and-a-half year-old boy, Lucas. Lucas is Irish/French, and I'm teaching him how to read. It's really satisfying work, and Lucas is very perceptive. Sometimes it's easy to forget just how little he is, 'cause he never lets me get away with anything: trying to let him win at tic-tac-toe ("but why did you go there?!"), making up the rules of a game as we go along, or trying to answer a question with "because."

I haven't seen him in three weeks, because of Christmas vacation, and today was our first day back together. When you spend three hours a week with a little guy like that, you get kind of attached. And I almost squeezed him when introducing me to his Christmas present, a really big stuffed dog. I asked if the dog has a name, and he said, "yes, his name is Big Dog."

And then he told me a knock-knock joke, and laughed himself silly.

Lucas: Knock knock!
Me: Who's there?
Lucas: Who!

Seriously, he thought this was the funniest thing ever. It made me really happy, and I wanted to freeze him in that moment. Or maybe I wanted to go back to when I thought knock-knock jokes were the height of humor?

When I was that age, I attended an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva. I was there from nursery four through third grade, and I was really happy. Half the day was in English, and half in Hebrew. I had lots of friends, and was good at school. I wasn't great at Hebrew, but I was in the gifted program for the English part of the day. I remember learning about Greek myths and Braille when the rest of the class was doing their Social Studies. Eventually my parents took me out, which they were very right to do. Math, History, English . . . all of it was getting short-changed in exchange for the Hebrew and Jewish studies. And seriously, I knew like four alphabets, and that's just not necessary in an eight year-old.

The school I moved to was a historically Episcopalian school, although it has been secular for about a hundred years. My mom always used to joke that half of my high school was half-Jewish, and she was probably right. Still, the parents of my former classmates were not very happy to let their kids play with me. And that really sucked. I stayed in touch with a bunch of them for a while, but then our lives just went different ways. Most of them went to Israel for a year between high school and college, and got married by their mid-twenties.

A little while back, I got a message out of the blue from my very first boyfriend. We were together in kindergarten and first grade (what can I say? I started young), and he was just the cutest. We would sit together on the bus for field trips, and I still have the birthday presents he gave me for my 6th and 7th birthdays. Somehow he found me on LinkedIn, and it was great to hear from him. He's married, of course, with two kids, and living in Florida.

Hearing from him inspired me to search for all the other friends I lost touch with ages ago. I found a bunch of them on facebook, and it's such a trip to see their faces all grown up. I have such vivid memories of that time: slumber parties, clapping games at recess, eating tuna fish sandwiches with potato chips smushed in the buns at Friday lunches, ballet and gymnastics classes after school, and the constantly changing alliances that are part and parcel of any group of young girls. Seeing pictures of them all in their wedding dresses and holding babies is just plain weird. And it really shows me just how far from ready I am for that life.

It's strange, since we all started out the same. We learned about sex at the same time and had our first crushes on the same boys. So when does the switch get flipped? How did they ALL end up married before 30, while I have no interest in even sharing a bathroom for the near future?