There was a calculated symmetry to his costume: matching hammers dangling from the thigh loops of his Carharts, two cordless nail guns holstered in his tool belt, along with thirty feet of rope and his jack-razor. Two-inch chain crisscrossed his chest, holding what I later discovered to be a pick ax, strapped to his back. He held in his gloved hand a sharpened broom stick. And duct-taped to his right forearm (yes, his forearm) was a small flashlight.
When I laughed out loud there was a look that flashed across his face for a split second. I believe he was already so invested in this action-packed version of himself that he'd forgotten how abnormal it would appear to me. But that look was quickly replaced with embarrassment as he let out the breath he'd been holding, now long and disappointed, and quickly tucked the makeshift spear behind his back. In that shame-full, fantasy-popping moment I saw the inescapable behavioral parallels of fathers and sons, and I was jealous of both Dave and his son Jungleboy, simultaneously. I wanted a son whom I could pass on my few endearing traits (pancakes, great dancer, rap) to, and I also wished I had a dad whose enthusiasms mirrored mine so exactly. When I saw Dave cast off his superhero id in a small fit, the accuracy of heredity smushed my nosed, braided my heart strings, silenced me. This is why:
Over this past summer Jungleboy developed a very welcome habit of waking me up early most mornings by standing at the end of my bed, mute, and fully decked out in one of the hundreds of costumes he's amassed. Some mornings I saw Spiderman. Sometimes The Hulk. Sometimes Boba Fett. And it was mutually understood that I was to respond to this wake up call by feigning extreme terror. There was one time he did actually scare me... I was half awake, just about to sit up when there on the stairs, sporting the mask from Scream and a butcher knife (yes, a real butcher knife; yes, he's five), rose my human alarm clock. And honestly, I wouldn't have been so easily scared by a midget version of the dude from Scream if he hadn't climbed the stairs in that manner - sideways, facing me the entire time, slowly revealing his top half above the horizon line of my floor, as if on an escalator. [He got in serious trouble for that one. Apparently, one of the neighbors had seen him marching resolutely down the street and through my front door, masked and gripping the butcher knife. They thought he was going to kill me in my sleep. Dave really reamed him out---not for the knife, or for waking me up in my own home, but for walking unchaperoned along the busy road that linked our houses.]

In that short fifty-foot walk from Dave's to my house, Jungleboy had become so invested in the WolvtorchBatSuperRoadVadertor persona that its comedic value had escaped him. And now an identical caught-off-guard reaction was expressed by his father when I guffawed at his vampire hunting uniform.
1 comment:
aaawww.... I totally relate, man.
That's awesome.
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