A Boy Grows Up

My son is almost eleven; at one of those precarious ages where he straddles two phases in life.  In his case, he sits astride childhood and adolescence.  I witness the balance almost daily as he does things that are still firmly rooted in the experience of childhood - having an imaginary battle against some villain or foe with a squirt gun in the shower or casting spells gleaned from the Harry Potter books on our morning walks to school with a stick he picked up along the way.  Simultaneously he moves toward independence, spurning my every attempt to help him with anything or vehemently insisting the clothes he picked, which perhaps match imperfectly "are fine, Dad."

These periods of transition, however slowly they proceed, are filled with poignance for me.  They seem both fraught and filled with possibility, but represent, when completed, irrevocable change that will influence the path he ultimately takes in the world.  Knowing they will end fills me with anticipatory nostalgia.

I am, for those who know me, deeply enamored of poetry.  Perhaps this is unusual.  I can trace it to a similar period of transition in my own life, when I was a freshman in college fully convinced my life would consist of a future in politics, starting with a political science major and being realized on completion of a law degree.  However, my freshman year I took a seminar that exposed me to great works in the Western literary canon followed by a survey course in English literature.  I fell in love with poetry in those two courses and switched majors to English, taking many courses focusing on or rife with poetry.  I found poetic expression to be a powerful means of examining the world and the way we experience it.

But what does poetry have to do with my son's transition from childhood to adolescence?  Quite a lot, I think.  Many of the best poems and poets capture such periods of transition in ways that other forms of written expression do not.  The best poetry penetrates the external realities of such periods and gets to the felt quality of them.  In particular, I am thinking of an Emily Dickinson poem:

Who never wanted,-- maddest joy
Remains to him unknown;
The banquet of abstemiousness
Surpasses that of wine 

Within its hope, though yet ungrasped
Desire's perfect goal,
No nearer, but reality
Should disenthrall thy soul.

The idea expressed in this poem seems to grasp perfectly the exquisite states of such periods of transition.  When my son passes firmly into adolescence he will not wholly abandon the wondrous and magical qualities of childhood, but they will be irrevocably changed.  This is normal and necessary for healthy human development.  Something will, however, be lost.  Reality will, to a large extent, disenthrall the boy's soul.  A razor and shaving cream will replace the squirt gun in the shower.  As a parent this prospect is poignant and a bit sad.

Being in the middle of my adult years, I appreciate the brief and fleeting nature of the transitions we experience as we mature.  Do not get me wrong - I look forward to the maturation of my son.  I can think of nothing finer than sitting down for a cup of coffee with him when he is a man or talking excitedly with him about college choices.  These too will be wonderful.  But still, there is nothing finer than hearing the silly shrill cries of the boy and his classmates as they play "lava monster" on the playground after school.

I think of the fleeting nature of these moments and am drawn to Dickinson's poem.  In the past, I have thought "the banquet of abstemiousness" had something of a negative, parsimonious quality.  Now I think I may have read it wrong.  Instead, the poem refers to the necessary parsimony of life - these moments of transition are loaded with beauty and delight, but are precious few and always fleeting; hence, representing the moments requires exquisite precision, just the way seeing a squirt gun in the shower captures this fleeting moment in my son's life perfectly.  To return to Dickinson, "hope is the the thing with feathers," joy is a ten-year-old boy with a squirt gun in the shower, and sorrow is not paying attention to either.