COLUMN: Lessons learned from counting bugs
“Your father wants to adopt you,” my mother said to me one morning while sliding a bowl of Sugar Pops across the Formica toward me.
“Your father wants to adopt you,” she said repeating and milking the line like a blues singer.
“What? What do you mean?” I said, even though I knew exactly what she meant.
Barely 6.5 years into life, I already knew how to make adults squirm. Heck, just the week before I had made a full-grown nun stutter and blush when she tried to primly explain about why it was a sin for us boys to “play with ourselves.”
What? What do you mean? I’m an only child, who else am I going to play with?
Damn! If adults weren’t so hung up on age, I could have won a lot of poker hands with that face instead of settling for being an alter boy and the St. Catherine second grade class’ priest in the school play.
I knew this father becoming my legal father thing was coming on for at least two years, but I had held my parents off by playing dumb. I was so smart. I kept on asking “What do you mean?”
Looking back, I suspect that talking about sex was even scarier than talking about divorce and custody, so they demurred to my check mate.
I knew what divorce was. Johnny Woods who lived across the street and never wore a shirt or shoes all summer and who was my best friend ’till we moved to the suburbs told me about it. I also sort of remember some weekend trips with some guy when I was maybe 2 and a half. But I hadn’t seen him since he moved to California.
Adoption was no big deal anyway. Just the year before I had consented to joining the big old Catholic church on the corner two blocks away. In first grade I pledged allegiance to God the Father even though most of the kids in the class had somehow made this decision when they were still pink, wrinkled babies.
Heck, we adopted kids all the time in Catholic school and we were only in second grade. Every time the class collection can reached $20, we were adopting some baby in Ethiopia, Mexico or China. Sometimes we even got to name them after one of our favorite saints or baseball players. The Cardinals were in the World Series in 1964 and we tried to name a lot of those foreign babies “Lou.”
So me getting adopted? No big deal.
On an unmemorable gray St. Louis day mom and soon-to-be-dad dressed me up in one of those cute kid’s suits and took me to the lawyer’s office. On the way through the city soon-to-be-dad told me “remember to say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no sir’ to these people.
Yeah, I knew adults liked this from a cute kid in a suit, so I beamed my angelic poker face and agreed.
So we get to this place that looks just like our apartment – only with names painted on the windows and I say “yes sir” and “no sir” a couple times to guys in adult suits. Then they send me outside to wait on the porch. Some non-lawyer lady is worried about me being bored or something, so she asks me to count all the Volkswagens that drive by on the street. I feel silly sitting there doing nothing and the people inside are taking a real long time. So I sit there and count Volkswagen bugs, vans and stations wagons that sputter down this side street until I think I got up past 50.
Finally my parents come out and say “everything is taken care of,” but all I’m trying to do is remember the number of Volkswagens. I keep thinking the non-lawyer lady is going to ask me and give me a prize like the nuns at school do when I answer questions.
I’m getting nervous and look around as we walk back toward our parked car and still nobody has asked me anything.
“Mom, I counted 52 Volkswagens” I finally blurt out.
She smiles down at me as she says, “Oh honey, you didn’t have to do that. That was just a game.”
“I knew that,” I said.
Dennis Hinkamp’s column appears every Friday. Comments can be sent to dhinkamp@msn.com.