danny, the champion of the world

Max sidled up to me at dinner and pulled my head toward him with both hands. “I’m gonna tell you a secret,” he said in the barely audible sub-whisper he likes to play with.

“What?” I whispered back.

“I’m not going to tell you about your birthday,” he said, and he walked away. I waved at my ear to dust off the garlic bread crumbs.

Forty minutes later, he did it again – pulled me close and wheezed into my ear. “Don’t look under Mia’s bookshelf, because that’s a secret,” he said, conspiratorially.

This time, he was not wearing pants.

I was sorting mail in the kitchen when Mia and Sarah snuck into the living room and started whispering at each other. After a few moments, Mia emerged to ask me my favorite cake flavor and shape. She was doing a survey — she wanted to ask everyone in the house, and then make the kind of cake that had the most votes.

I didn’t hear her ask anyone else.

By bedtime, Max had dropped the whisper entirely.

“Daddy, I’m gonna tell you something,” he said, nowhere near sleep.

“What’s that?”

“Daddy, don’t look under Mia’s bookshelf.”

“I won’t, Max.”

“Because that’s a secret.”

“Okay, I won’t look under—”

“If you go into Mia’s bedroom don’t look under the bookshelf because that’s a secret and it’s for your birthday.”

“Okay,” I said, and I gave him a solemn nod. 

And he pulled my face close and pressed his nose against mine. And said nothing more.

I am thirty-six years old – thirty-seven on Sunday, if you’re the birthday-wishing type. Which means that I’m an old man, or relatively old – relative to, say, Mia. And I have read tens – nay, low hundreds – of books in those thirty-seven years, some of them numbering as many as 300 pages, many of them chapter books! I do not boast; it is just the truth. I am a phenomenal reader. Easily among the top two in my house.

But not for long. One year ago, Mia walked into kindergarten with a pretty good handle on the alphabet and the ability to read, like, simple five-word sentences. Yesterday? She read “The Wizard of Oz.” 200 pages.

Yesterday.

So, to recap, three takeaways: I am getting old; my six-year-old is smarter than me; and my six-year-old is smarter than me.

Max in his sister’s room, less than a minute after the prohibition was posted.

For five years we brushed those teeth, twice a day, often for whole seconds at a time. Five years – almost her whole life – we made her drink milk – made her, and when she asked why she had to drink milk, I would tap my front teeth and say the same thing – “gives you strong choppers.” And then one Friday in August, she misses a monkey bar at camp, and dives face-first to the ground below – teeth-first, really – and Sarah gets a phone call, and the dentist sends them to the surgeon, and the nitrous oxide is produced, and those teeth, the ones we scrubbed so faithfully, the ones she applied to corn and toast and broccoli and string cheese, to say nothing of the sugar donuts she’d had for breakfast that very day, those teeth are suddenly in a tiny plastic sleeve, handed off to Mom on her way back home to summon the tooth fairy. 

And for all the concern, for all the furrowed brows on all the foreheads of parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends and neighbors, for all the pitying clucks she gets from everyone who hears the story, she cannot thtop thmiling, thowing off what’th no longer there and crowing about the lucre under her pillow.

Two bucks a pop. Seemed like a good place to start.