THE DAD FILES: Magic Men

Our boys are learning to count. Jack, several times, sang out the numbers one through ten, in order, just last month. Eli imitated him but didn’t get farther than five.

They sometimes falter. This morning, I assembled their little toy cars in a line in front of them and counted one through four.

Jack responded by pointing at the cars and saying “Two, three, five!”

He seemed very proud of himself, and I didn’t tell him he was wrong. Instead, I actually found myself electrified, for a moment, with a sense of possibility. In the moment, my first thought was, “What if he’s right?”

A moment later, I laughed out loud.

I love my boys so much that I see a sense of genius in them all of the time.

Eli’s strange affection for wires—he started moving toward all electrical devices from the moment he could propel himself at all, and he has never stopped—makes me think one day he will be a very successful electrician or engineer.

When Jack picks up a pair of spoons, holds them just like drum sticks and starts banging on his high chair tray, I think perhaps he will be a musician.

I didn’t know till this morning, however, that my love for them is so great, my affection so boundless, that I will go wherever they point me. After I started laughing at Jack’s “two, three, five” and my own reaction to it, I still found myself wondering, whenever my attention drifted, if we have failed to unlock the secrets of the universe because we don’t count correctly: It’s not one, two, three. It’s two, three, five. What might the implications be?

These thoughts, of course, make no sense. But there they were—funny little gifts from the magic world of my toddler boys, where so little has been learned that everything is new and the boundaries of the world are yet to bind us.