They Didn’t Vote For Summer

My older boy is in Junior High School.

He is sophisticated enough now to occasionally be inscrutable to his father. He can’t keep it up for very long, and under hard questioning you can always figure out what’s up. I think. But he really does keep his own counsel from time to time. It’s interesting to see a person develop out of the unthrown pot of childhood.

He goes to regular school. He participates in most everything, but he has no monomania. You can already see the kids who won’t do anything but play sports until they’re adults and will then spend the rest of their lives telling everybody that they used to play sports. The busybody girls already exist. Geeks, joiners, loners, emo kids, jocks, princesses and so forth are already are forming in the little larvae.

My boy isn’t any of those things. He drifts among them all, it seems to me, and is friend to all, or at least all the kids that aren’t entirely meatheads.

You make people, and then you raise them, and you’re still in a sort of wonder at how they turn out. In general, whenever the kids are charming I see my wife in there somewhere, and when they blot their copybook it’s all me. I’m not sure if that’s human nature or the opposite of human nature on my part but it’s the truth.

If I put on my human nature cap, and use it to figure out what happened yesterday based on sketchy information, here’s what happened to my boy:

The teacher was looking for someone cooperative enough to lose the Class President election to whatever monomaniac girl was running unopposed in it.

My boy don’t care and he won anyway.