Two Boys

At the end of I See You Everywhere, a * novel by Julia Glass, a pair of teen boys gallops through her final chapter.  Their names are Luke and Max.  They make their boisterous entrance in cleats, trailing clods of mud and sod and one bouncing soccer ball, polite and dirty and loud.  They include a 6 year old little boy visitor, their step-mother, and a stranger houseguest in their world and conversation, seeing all three in a way that I’m not sure teenagers usually do – in my experience, anyone not teen is to them simply a blur of “parent,” “old guy,” “really old guy,” “not-me.”  Maybe I’m not doing teenagers credit.  Maybe I’m remembering my own myopic teenager vision.

These boys, brothers who appear for about 20 pages at the end of a painfully lovely**  novel about sisters, captivate me.  How easy it was for Ms. Glass to make these boys in all their glorious boy-ness.  She wrote, and they became.  She could have made them sullen, or brash, or introspective, but if they started that way, she simply hit the delete key on her word processor and re-built them in a better way, the best way, if you want my opinion.  These are the teenagers I would love my sons to be, in their relationships to each other, and to other people.

How do I make them, I wonder?   I have no delete key.  How do I not mess this up?

Two boys.  How my soul thrills at the thought of tromping soccer cleats, grass stained knees, mile high bowls of chocolate ice cream, boys who want to share these things with me.  Boy Heaven, is where I live now, where I will live.  Please let me do right by them.  And them by me.

*insert gushing adjective of choice; e.g. beautifully-written, lovely, enduring, fantastic, etc.

**ah!  I settled on a description