Where We Going, Daddy__ Life With Two Sons Unlike Any Other - Jean-Louis Fournier [12]
And then, one day, once upon a time, there was a charming, cultured girl with a sense of humor. She took an interest in me and my two little kids. We were very lucky, she stayed. Thanks to her, Thomas learned to open and close a zipper. Not for long. The next day he couldn’t remember how, he’d forgotten everything, we had to start the learning process from square one again.
With my children no one need ever worry about repeating themselves, my sons forget everything. With them, nothing’s ever old hat, in a rut, or boring. Nothing goes out of fashion, everything’s new.
My little birds, I’m so sad to think you’ll never experience the thing that, for me, has constituted the greatest moments of my life.
Those extraordinary moments when the world is reduced to a single person, when you exist only for her and thanks to her, you tremble at the sound of her footsteps, the sound of her voice, and go weak at the knees when you see her. When you’re afraid you might break her from holding her so tight, when every kiss is bliss and the world around you melts away.
You will never know that delicious shivering feeling that runs from your head down to your toes, throws you into turmoil, more of an upheaval than moving houses, an electrocution, an execution. Turns you upside down with your feet off the ground, makes you feel lost, makes you feel found, picks you up and spins you around. It shakes you up inside, makes you hot and cold all over, makes you flutter and makes you stutter, makes your hair stand on end, drives you around the bend, makes you say the dumbest things, makes you laugh but also makes you cry.
Because, alas, my little birds, you will never know how to conjugate the indicative mood of the first person of the present tense of the verb to love.
When someone in the street asks me to make a donation for handicapped children I say no.
I don’t dare say I have two handicapped children, they would think I was joking.
With an offhand smile, I allow myself the luxury of saying, “Handicapped children? I’ve got the T-shirt.”
I’ve just invented a bird. I’ve called it Grounded. It’s a rare bird, not like others. It’s afraid of heights. Which is tough luck for a bird. But it keeps its spirits up. Instead of feeling sorry for itself, it jokes about its handicap.
Every time someone asks it to fly, it always finds a funny excuse not to, and makes everyone laugh. It’s got plenty of nerve, too, it makes fun of the birds that can fly, the normal birds.
It’s as if Thomas and Mathieu could make fun of the normal children they see in the street.
Turning the world on its head.
It’s raining and Josée has returned from her walk with the children. She’s busy getting Mathieu to eat.
I can’t see Thomas, and go out of the room. His snow-suit is hanging on the coatrack in the corridor, still puffed up, still in the shape of a body. I go back into the room stony-faced.
“Josée, why’ve you hung Thomas from a coat hook?”
She looks up blankly.
I persevere with my joke: “Just because he’s disabled doesn’t mean you can hang him on a coat hook?”
Josée didn’t miss a beat and replied, “I’m leaving him to dry for a minute, he was soaked.”
My children are very affectionate. In shops Thomas wants to kiss everyone, young, old, rich, poor, blacks, whites, indiscriminately.
People get quite embarrassed when they see a boy of twelve bearing down on them. Some back away, others let him get on with it and—as they wipe their faces with a hanky—they say, “He’s so sweet!”
And it’s true, they’re sweet. They see no evil in anything, like the innocent. They date back to before original sin, to a time when the world was good, when nature was well-meaning, when every kind of mushroom was edible and you could stroke tigers safely.
When they’re at the zoo, they want to kiss