xir's world

Xir fished around under the refrigerator with the broom this morning to retrieve a car that had rolled underneath. What he came up with was:

-two toy mice

-a marble

-a Sacagewea dollar

-a koosh ball (has it been under there since the '80s, I wonder?)

-myriad hair bands

-several magnets

-dustballs enough to insulate a smallish shed

-a lost bakugan ball.

The way he greeted this bakugan ball was downright lyrical. He sang to it. He carried it around murmuring to it that this was the happiest day of his life. He carried out a little ceremony honoring the car that had rolled under the fridge in the first place, for 'rescuing' the bakugan. He took it into the bath with him. He tucked it into bed beside him.

However, this was the first I'd heard of it. I had no idea that a) the bakugan was his favorite toy or b) that it had been lost. Lately I've come to understand just how circumspect this extraordinarily special and exasperating six-year-old is.

"If Baba gets remarried I'll have a step-sister," he mentioned as we walked to the store today. (How long has THAT been percolating?)

"ladies and gentlemen", he announced into his sing-along-cassette-player mic, "the world will now be ending because of meteors and climate change. But the Andromeda galaxy will be all right."

"Do you know what Juan Pablo did one time? He held my arms down so I couldn't block Kenny Rey when he punched me. He was making me the victim. But that was a long long time ago when Kenny Rey was my enemy." Whoa, whoa, you had an ENEMY? Someone PUNCHED you? "It was a long time ago mom. When we still had drama class." You had drama class?

This child growls along behind me on hands and knees, biting the clothes that hang from the racks, as I try to buy him shoes. When I hiss under my breath that he should stand up because he is embarrassing me, he responds "I am a saber-tooth cat and they do not care about embarrassment." When I use my banshee voice to tell him that saber-tooth tiger or no, he is not getting any shoes until he gets up out of the middle of the aisle and removes his teeth from the merchandise, he doesn't bat an eyelash as he responds "you mean saber-tooth CAT. You always get that wrong. There was never any such thing as a saber-tooth tiger."

He happily wears the waldorfy linen tops and chunky knit scarves I make for him, though I don't know how much longer that will last. He believes in the Tao but not the tooth fairy. He hums his own theme music as we walk along, pretending his hands are men, engaged in an eternal fight against one another using anything we pass as weapons: sticks, acorns, blades of grass, bougainvillea flowers. He has firm plans to save the world by a) gathering up all of the garbage humans have piled into landfills and loading it into a spaceship bound for incineration by the sun and b) sailing a ship equipped with two extremely large cups, which he will fill repeatedly with water from the sea and deliver to villages around the world that do not have enough drinking water.

I will discuss the difficulties of desalinization with him at some future time. Though, for all I know, he's already got that angle figured, and is just playing his cards close to his chest. I wouldn't be surprised.