June 30: Speech, New Poem, Bow Rye

If you haven't noticed yet, I tend to worry a great deal about my two-year-old son.  I probably worry more about him than I ever worried about my daughter when she was the same age.  Don't get me wrong.  My son is a great kid.  He's funny, energetic (a little too energetic at times), and independent.  He wants to do everything himself and gets really frustrated when he runs head-first into the wall of babyhood.  He can't stand the limitations of being small.

My son ready to hit the road

One of the things I worry about the most is my son's speech.  I started worrying about it when he was tested for preschool this April and qualified for a "special" program that involves speech therapy.  He is still at the stage where he needs someone to translate for him.  I feel like I work for a U.N. ambassador when he's trying to talk to a stranger at McDonald's.  The stranger usually looks at me, baffled, and I have to explain, "He's trying to tell you he's eating fries and ice cream."  For a while, I thought he might have a hearing problem, but he doesn't.  He hears things three rooms away that I can't even detect.

Bowel a meal

I've been trying to set these fears aside, let my son be himself, develop at his own pace.  It's hard.  I want him to be able to read and write before he hits kindergarten.  I want him to skip a few grades, go to college at the age of ten.  That's not going to happen, but every parent harbors those kinds of hopes.

Today's poem is about my son and the way he talks.  It's also about language and happiness, and the poetry that comes out of his mouth sometimes.  My son really does use language right now the way a poet should use language--playfully, with joy.

Saint Marty captures his son's joy, hopefully

Bow Rye

My son leaves off consonants when he speaks, too busy to articulate words the way the offspring of a poet should at the age of two.  My car, a raspberry jam-colored Ford, becomes, on my son's tongue, a dead dar.  The milk he sucks down in his crib is his bowel a meal.  At McDonald's, he eats fry anyoo.  Fries and ice cream.  The motorcycle across the street, a coonshawwa.  When my father cuts the grass, he pushes an own kowler.  If my son wants company, he orders my wife, Mumma she, until she sits beside him on the couch.

Today, after my son takes his afternoon nyeah, my brother, Un Pow, will take him for a bow rye.  As the pontoon slides into the water, my son, swaddled in a sherbet preserver, will point at the dark line of teas along the shore, at the schools of small fees darting through the shallows.  He'll hear the motors of other boats, mistake them for pains in the sky.  And when the wind hits him in the face, the spray of the waves dampens his hair as they cruise into deep water, my son will jump, wave, scream, laugh.  Speechless.  Unable to say what he feels.  Not knowing a word big enough.

Bow rye, anyone?