Cracked Window

I drilled into our little boy today another of my dead mother’s irrational holiday rules: everything Christmas related must be taken down before the new year begins. Otherwise, the most dire bad luck will ensue.

Atticus accepted the rule as if our very existence hinged upon it, and we did mom proud. As a bonus, he learned another valuable lesson while helping unscrew the Christmas tree holder — lefty loosey, righty tighty.

And he’s been repeating it over and over while setting up a make-believe bookstore and pretending to take phone calls from Santa Claus. All this after his first inauspicious attempt to use his Christmas gift scooter and showing off in this video that his mother, Suzame, made.

What my mother missed.

At the Portland Farmers Market, roasting chilies perfume every cool breath. Autumn has thinned the crowds but not the produce. Along with poblanos, I buy what may be the year’s last peaches, several varieties of apples, shiitake mushrooms, and more.

The once-ubiquitous volunteers registering people to vote are nowhere to be seen beneath the canopy of blue sky and elms. A sign perhaps that the presidential race is over, except for the vile death rattle from the McCain-Palin attack machine.

People look happy to be here, more so than usual. And why not? We’re surrounded by nature’s bounty on a classic fall day. But I sense something else, something more uplifting, even with the economy gone to hell.

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What will the boy remember of yesterday? Years hence, is Atticus, my son of three, doomed to never recall his first day at the new edge of his known world, the Pacific Coast?

As I watched him run toward and away from tiny advancing and retreating waves, I realized how fleeting the moment probably was. Not just his memory of what he did but the pure delight of not caring about anything else. Neither the event or the feeling might ever return.

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Atticus Bales Tong, three days shy of three years old, doesn’t know the meaning of the word gun. Suzame and I didn’t set out to deprive him of this knowledge, though it’s no doubt a dividend of allowing scant TV viewing — and only since he turned two.

I learned this today when I handed him a garden hose. The hose has a squeeze-handle nozzle. I said, “Here’s your gun.” And he didn’t know what I meant. And this is a boy with a remarkable vocabulary, including some Spanish, French, and Cantonese.

Sometimes ignorance is a state of grace. How long can it last?