stories

When Axel just began to talk, I compulsively wrote down each new word, keeping lists alongside the notes about what he was eating, how much he slept. It's a habit of mine, this keeping track. After a certain point, though, he learned words too fast for me to keep track, and began to put word combinations together and next thing I knew, he and I were having long conversations. Axel is fairly shy, so most people don't have a sense of just how much he talks; it's a pretty constant stream, a blend of sports commentary and embellishment, and, of late, pure invention. I regret not writing down Axel's first out-right lie, which he told last fall--he delivered some pure fiction to me about Mychal, delivering it with absolute conviction, and a gleam in his eye which told me that he knew that I knew that he was making it up.

By now, his stories are more elaborate, but they're also more obviously fiction, as he throws in formulas like "one day," or, more obviously, "once there was." He tells them to himself, with or without an audience, using his little plastic guys to act them out.

Lately, he's grown so confident with language, that he'll try out any word. "Unfortunately, you can't have a cookie, because you already had ice cream," I told him, and hear in response: "Unfortunately, I want a cookie." Or, combining phrases from books with his favorite past-times, he says, "I'd be delighted to help you sweep." Or, after watching "Up!," he tells me: "Literally, that bird was a peacock." The word this morning was "serenade," a useful word if ever, given how much music he's been playing lately.

As his language grows, we get a better sense of how much he really remembers. The other day, he asked me whether I remembered the "that show we saw in the theater with the sad vampire and the puffets?" Which we saw five months ago in Lviv. After we'd gotten back from Virginia this summer, Axel told me, "Remember, Grandpa only had one fish in a bowl on his table." I'd actually forgotten the Siamese fighting fish in the little bowl on the coffee table, as I'd been pre-occupied with my grandfather, who has Alzheimer's and was repeatedly throwing up during our visit.

This is one of my favorite aspects of parenting, getting these little glimpses into his interiority. Especially when a child is learning language, there is so much repetition: it's not always clear how much of his speech is repeating formulas or codes that he hears along the way. But as he verbalizes his recollections, out of the blue as we're driving to the store, à propos absolutely nothing, I get a hint of what's going on in his little head.