At the end of Jasmine Street in Willamette City where we live there is a thicket, a patch of fir trees under grown by holly with a trail running through it. It's an easement owned by the town, opening out on the other end to a large grassy field belonging to the Grace City Church.
Three children live on our block-long dead end street of single-family homes, ages six to eight. We'll call them Xena, Jack and Ella, for together they are a warrior princess, a legendary pirate and song belted from a mountain top, each in their own way.
(Both the place names and the identities have been changed to protect the children and their families, but their exploits are completely true.)
Jack's Wood is a vital feature of the neighborhood, for its quarter acre serves as a bicycle trail, obstacle course, hideout or the prow of a ship. Jack scans the horizon for villages to burn, churns clouds of dust on his bike, screams warrior screams as he zooms over the bump in the trail at the edge of the forest, the place where we first saw him on the day we moved in.
The three of them are each bright and exceptional with different gifts, cute as kittens, fierce as a stick-sword pressed into your Adam's Apple.
Xena has dark, straight hair and brown eyes, a few months the oldest, the tallest of the three. She's thoughtful, a planner. For Halloween she put together a block party, complete with menus and activities. Handwritten invitations were tucked inside every screen door. Every household came, a table overflowing with chili and cornbread and three kinds of pie. Her father lit a firepit for marshmallows. The kids carved pumpkins. There was music on a portable stereo. Sharon made a pecan pie.
Jack's the youngest, a kindergartner with a slightly crooked smile and Tarzan-length hair. His parents have bathed him in love and confidence. He's fearless and sweet. He charges down the hill where Jasmine Street passes the church on scooters, bikes and skateboards. His father takes him skiing, first cross country and this winter downhill for the first time. Once on a walk his mother asked how to ride the scooter. "You just GO," he said, neatly summing up his philosophy of life. He just goes.
Ella is short and determined with a woolly mop of red-brown curls that explode out from underneath her bicycle helmet like fireworks. Her father is a professor of archaeology at a nearby college, her mother an administrator at the same school. In their garage is an electric car and a large telescope. Ella steers by the brightest, furthest star she can name in all things.
As you might guess, there are no betas in this group. They'll play agreeably for a while, have some disagreement as to direction or purpose, work it out or fly apart for a while. After a break to cool down they'll come back together, resuming play as if not much happened. Over the two years all alliances have proved temporary and no grudges have been kept past tomorrow's breakfast. They're a model for the world.
One of their latest ventures is The Helper Squad. The three decided they would knock on every door within their tether and offer themselves for chores and tasks, cleaning yards or windows for two or three quarters each. Mind you, they are 6, 8, and 8.
In their rounds they came to us and I invited them, with their parents' permission, to help us plant wildflowers in the 18x24-foot patch of ground at the front end of Jack's Wood. Earlier this year I'd chopped away the weeds with a pick axe and laid down a bed of fallen leaves to improve the clay soil. It's nearly ready to plant. At the first of the month my wife Sharon bought us six yards of good garden dirt, delivered, and we'll spread a layer of that this weekend.
It happens that yesterday was the start of spring break, so The Helper Squad will come by for wildflower seed spreading on Wednesday.
On the porch after school on Tuesday they were jumping up and down with excitement about this choice assignment.
But they wanted something they could do right away, eager to get their business venture started, too ambitious to wait for summer lemonade stands. More jumping up and down, Ella eager for me to name an assignment. I suggested that the wildflower patch needed more leaves, because there was a section, about a quarter of it, that was still bare. Maybe you could finish it, I said.
The three of them accepted. While I went back to my nap they laid out leafy compost over the bare ground. When I woke up there were three twigs arranged on our front porch in a rough tepee, intended, I think, as sign language to indicate they'd finished. When I walked out to the end of the driveway I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) at how thoroughly and carefully they'd finished the project.
Last Sunday we had dinner with Jack and his parents. He's a high school history teacher, she's a nutritionist. Marvelous, attentive parents, delightful people. They don't own a TV. Most nights after supper are devoted to reading and games.
Over salad, grilled cheeses and tomato bisque soup we learned Jack had just passed his first 100 days of kindergarten. He and his classmates had each made themselves a hat emblazoned with "100 Days Brighter," shaped like a native headdress. He'd made a "Happy St. Patrick's Day" poster, taped to the front door for our visit.
The next day I was in the Dollar Store shopping for writing supplies, and I snagged two Dinosaur Notebooks, one for me and one for Jack. I got him a congratulations card and my wife and I signed it. "Congratulations on being 100 Days Brighter," I wrote. In a perfect world, we all would be.
I put four singles inside the card. "Seed money for your business," I told him. "You and Xena and Ella can buy cleaning supplies or snacks."
Pablo Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The trick is to remain one when you grow up." In the same way every child is an adventurer, an explorer, a daredevil and an entrepreneur. The shameful thing is that life wears down our optimism and yearning to make grand plans, to be boldly childlike in our willingness to dream.
My father was a crass and violent man who died at the age I am now. He was driving a semi the day he died, delivering a load of coffee in Layton, Utah. The Old Man chocked the wheels, pulled up the gate of the trailer and collapsed on the dock, dead of a heart attack. He'd been a smoker well into his 50s and was overweight.
The relevant part of his story in this one is that all his life my father had dreams, a desire to start something big and be a big operator. He'd sketch out plans and budgets. He'd start projects. A trucking school. A barge for harvesting river rock.
Some of his ideas were remarkably ahead of his time. In the 80s he pondered converting an old school bus he'd bought into a mobile restaurant. An avid football fan who'd record games on his Betamax to rewatch over the winter, he'd sketch out plays for an offense: no huddle, with the quarterback in shotgun on every play, a concept that now dominates the game.
Everett dropped out of school after the ninth grade. He didn't have a dinosaur notebook, but by his chair on the lamp table there were invariably scraps of paper scrawled with notes and trial budgets.
When he died, going through his effects, next to his shotgun shells and a stubby bottle of Mennen Skin Bracer, I found $20,000 in a Metamucil jar under his porch. Seed money for his business. I divided into six envelopes and sent an equal share to each of my siblings.
