Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

She is a Broadway musical made flesh,

“It’s not awful,” Bruce had said. “It’s a mixed bag. But there are twenty-five kids in a class, at least, which means the learning is inefficient. If you’re bright, you’re slowed down by the fact that other kids can’t move at your pace. And in part because there are so many kids, they run the schools like factories, or, dare I say, jails. You’re put in lines, moved when the bells ring, allowed to run around in a high-fenced yard once a day. None of this is conducive to deep thinking or creativity. You start to go deep into a subject, and a bell rings to pull you out of it.”

Bruce sighs, because in the dream he was just having, Eddie was five. The little boy was sitting on his lap, on the couch, and Bruce was reading Winnie-the-Pooh to him. Eddie was leaning against his father’s chest, and the sensation of that weight—the complete trust and lack of inhibition with which the boy relaxed every ounce of his body into his father’s—was one of the things that made parenthood unmissable.

He hopes that his boys find this same kind of unbalanced logic in their own futures.