Should I Still Wish by John W. Evans

Author:John W. Evans [Evans, John W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9579-7
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2016-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

The Big House

Last night your mother said, “Remember how much Walt liked the goldfish?” and I said, “So much,” and she said, “Where did it go?” and I said, “The tape fell off the edges, so we took it down. Maybe look in the baby book,” but we were both very tired from chasing you and your brother, and anyway, we haven’t done the best job of keeping up the book since Sam came along, so probably the goldfish is gone, having served its purpose, though I remember the day we put it up so clearly. You were a little older than one. The picture was cut from an oversized wall calendar that your mother bought on clearance at the discount store. She had noticed how you liked animals, and we wanted to make a schedule of daycare handoffs, her classes, and my work. There was a big brown bear on the first page. She found online a picture of a dog and glued it in place so I wouldn’t have to look at the bear all month. The next month came the goldfish you so loved: bright orange on a white backdrop, in high relief and magnified to twenty times its size, entirely out of water and happy to draw your attention those mornings we would lay on the big bed considering it together, first thing, while your mother got dressed, you and I talking and tracing its imaginary path across the wall and out the door, into the garden where you liked to hose the plants and dig in your sandbox. Where would the goldfish go when he finally left? Could he make it all the way to the street, the golden hills, the coast, China? You didn’t understand the questions. You pointed at the calendar. I said, “Goldfish.” You smiled and kept pointing.

Your brother, Sam, is the same age now that you were then. How is he already so big and still so much smaller than I ever remember you? When you were this age, I flung you wildly in the air. I rolled around with you on the floor, and we went together to the burrito shop to eat giant plates of brown rice with black beans. At the bookstore, we looked at fire trucks and birds. We spent all day doing such mindless things together that the boredom seemed like it might kill me, and now you pace him for us, and he and I do the same things with a certain suggestion of nostalgia, and often you in tow. I suppose that’s how it goes with younger siblings. We think he is a little younger than he actually is. Certainly, we take a little more care. Or, perhaps Sam is simply a different child: more sensitive and careful, less reckless. I think we are more relaxed when we parent our new one-year-old, though I might misremember that too. Already, another brother is on his way.

Just the other day, I got that wrong. I told a parent at your preschool that you were only two years old.

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