Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

Josie watched her children shoot their arrows, running and giggling, and realized that a child’s forgetting of joy is the principal crime committed upon a parent. Raj, in one of his rants, had said as much. His daughter was seventeen. Oh god, he said. The seventeen-year-olds, they will rip your heart out. A whole joyous childhood, and they will tell you it was all shit. Every year was a fraud. They will throw it all away. Josie had felt for Raj, and had feared the wrath from her own children, but then remembered: Hadn’t she emancipated herself from her own mother and father? But for her own children, Josie was determined to thwart this crime of forgetting. She would remind them of joy. Document joy, tell tales of joy at bedtime, take photos and write diaries. Journals of joy that could never be denied or conveniently forgotten. She began to conceive a new theory of parenting, where the goal was not the achieving of a desired result. The object is not to raise a child for some future outcome, no! Times like these, together in the pines amid the fading light, as the kids run through long grass, her son gravely teaching himself archery while her daughter tries to induce some self-injury, these moments alone were the object. Josie felt, fleetingly, that she could die having achieved such a day. Get to a place like this, get to a moment like this, and that alone is the object. Or it could be the object. A new way of thinking. Stretch some of these days together and that’s all o...