danny, the champion of the world

They like to walk along the cinderblock walls on the way to and from school.

Max especially, but Mia too, and this morning, as she navigated the balance beam in front of the neighbor’s house, last night’s dream came back to her. “I was walking on a bridge” – a bridge just like the wall – “and I got to a house on stilts, and I went inside, and the roof had holes in it. And a bunch of birds landed on the house, and they started pooping in the holes. So I hid under the table.”

I think it’s the first coherent dream she’s told me about after the fact. She’s like me, she doesn’t remember her dreams, or if she does, she keeps them to herself. Maybe the only other dream she’s ever really told me about was the one just after Max was born – he couldn’t have been more than a week old, and Mia woke up screaming. “I dreamt that Mommy put me in a basket,” she told me, still shivering and barely awake “—and pushed me up to the sky.” Sarah’s still getting over that one.

But this dream, the pooping bird dream, had Mia laughing, just like it had me laughing and it definitely had Max laughing. I mean, birds! Pooping! Through holes in the ceiling!

“Isn’t that funny?” she said, and it was more a statement than a question. “Isn’t it?”

***

It was good to see Max laughing.

All morning he’d been complaining. His bottom itched, and though we checked it and it was clean, he kept tugging at it, pulling his pants clear down and twisting his body around to inspect his bum.

We never did figure it out, but he kept it up. At school, after the pledge, I ran into Mia’s kindergarten teacher. While we chatted, I felt something on the back of my leg. It was Max, facing away, furiously rubbing his butt up and down against my leg. Like a bear scratching an itch on a tree.

He complained a little more, all the way home, but he settled down. Don’t know what it was. I’m telling you, the boy was clean.

I asked Max to tell me what happens after class starts, but it took a while for him to warm up to it. He was bored of walking to school, because walking to school is so boring, and besides his legs hurt, or so he said. (I’ve noticed that they only start hurting when he’s bored.)

But he did warm up, and I learned that after I leave him, they all sit in a circle and sing songs, and then someone rolls the dice, and someone else gets to put that many hearts onto the big heart on the wall. Not long after, they pick the jobs for going to the park.

“Oh yeah?” I say. “What kind of jobs?”

“Well, there’s the water bottle.”

“The water bottle?”

“Yeah, there’s the water bottle, where you bring the water bottle. And there’s flag. And there’s bicycles.”

“So you get to push the bicycles to the park?”

“No, you get to ride on the bicycle, and then you get to ride it around the basketball court, and then it’s someone else’s turn, but you get to ride it back to class at the end.”

I told Max that sounded like a pretty good job. Way better than water bottle, anyway. Is that the best job?

“No, leader is the best job, because you get to lead everyone to the park. But I like bicycles best.”

“Yeah, I bet – it’s fun to ride the bike, huh?”

“No, it’s because you get to sit down the whole way.”

***

Three days ago there was a football game on our TV, which doesn’t happen often, not after the Golden Bears are done playing anyway. Mia asked who we were rooting for, and since we weren’t, I let them choose.

“Well, I think we should vote for the Cardinals,” Max said, and his mom smiled because she went to college with Kurt Warner, or something like that.

Mia piped in. “Yeah, we should vote for the Cardinals because the Steelers sound like they steal things and that’s not good.”

Then Max: “Yeah, and Cardinals are a kind of bird, and birds are animals, and I love animals.”

So we voted for the Cardinals, because they’re animals, and you all know how that worked out for us. Not that Max minded. During the game he got busy drawing a double-sided bird of some sort, using a red Sharpie to color in the breast because the ink bleeds through.

“Hey that’s cool,” I told him. “Is that a Cardinal?”

“No, Daddy. It’s a scarlet macaw.”

***

On Inauguration Day they taped a page from the L.A. Times to the window at Max’s school. It was an illustration, an artist’s rendering of Barack Obama speaking with all 42 previous presidents seated behind him. I pointed to it and said to Max, “Do you know who that is?”

He didn’t, which surprised me, because every time he hears the radio say the president’s name he says “Hey Daddy, they said Bracko Bomma!” Instead, he took me by the hand and led me over to another window, where he pointed inside at the poster of Martin Luther King, which they had taped to the wall for the lesson on that week’s holiday.

“Who’s that?”

Martin Luther King, I told him. Did you learn about Martin Luther King?

“Yeah,” he said, and then he led me back to the picture of Obama. “That’s who that is.”