Sixer

My son turns six tomorrow.

We spent the morning making little gift bags for everybody in his afternoon kindergarten class. He's all about Pokemon right now. It was my idea to make a handwritten Pikachu note for every bag, and so at ten AM I found myself at the kitchen table, drawing and cutting out sixteen yellow card stock Pikachus for sixteen gift bags, and passing them onto Jack so that he could color their cheeks and stripes. At the time I found myself wishing I hadn't volunteered for this job -- by Pikachu number nine or ten, they weren't even looking like Pokemon to me anymore -- but I'm glad I did. Because afterward, in the hours before I was going to drop him and his big bag of birthday stuff off at school, I slunk upstairs to write.

Almost immediately after Jack went through the door into school, I started feeling bad about the time I'd spent locked up in the study, working back and forth between Black Wing edits and the script I'm consulting on. I wouldn't even call this feeling guilt, but more a kind of heaviness, a sense of missing him and losing an opportunity that I shouldn't have passed up. By the time I got to work this afternoon, the feeling had hardened into a kind of emotional peanut butter in my belly. When I see him again in the morning, he won't be five anymore. He'll be six. While he was busy being five, I was busy writing.

I interviewed Scott Turow once when I was in college, and he made a remark along the lines of, "In America, there's a sense of the world tugging men away from the bosom of their families." At the time I thought the comment was maybe a little overwrought, but now that I have kids of my own, I couldn't agree more.

So I think back about our hour together this morning, sitting next to my son, cutting out yellow Pokemon shapes and passing them to him for coloring in the cheeks and the stripes, and I chip away little by little at that bolus of guilt peanut butter in my gut.

It's still there, but it's getting smaller, one Pikachu at a time.