The So Called Life of Little Rat

Little Rat started driver's ed this week which is a good thing because it's also the week of his HSAs, the dreaded compulsory tests that everyone must take (and pass) to graduate from high school. Yesterday was the English exam and Little Rat took 5.5 hours, longer that anyone else, the only person in the room aside from the teacher, filling in bubbles with a #2 pencil. I imagine that driver's ed must've been a relief yesterday afternoon. What do you do when the light turns red?

If he passes, it will be a miracle -- not the ordinary drop down from Heaven kind of miracle that Hollywood and bad preachers tell us to pray for -- but the kind of miracle that takes hard work and good and patient people coming together faithfully to accomplish the task at hand. Even after they've been handed a bucket with a hole or a dull knife.

I just wish I could have your brain Dad! This comes out of nowhere, a voice from the very backseat joining our conversation full of 10 cent words. We were driving somewhere, probably laughing or eating ice cream, some combination of the 7 of us out for a ride or a new view of the world. Little Rat's brain often works this way: non sequiturs are his valentines, funny little love poems that might get lost in translation if your ear is untrained. We tease him about this still, but yesterday I stopped and asked myself if I'd give up a few IQ points for the cause? All the times my own neurons served me well -- SAT scores, AP exams, the philosophy paper I wrote in a handful of hours while everyone else labored for weeks -- would I settle for a little less of the success that has come so easy to see Little Rat succeed at what he finds so hard?

He wants to be an artist. He talks about it all the time and with such wistfulness that I sometimes don't know what to say; people's dreams can be a minefield over which a tightrope is strung for you to walk. There's American Idol and then there's the American Dream and there is the danger of one overtaking the other. A few weeks ago Little Rat brought home "Boy Sleeping in Clouds." Last weekend he took Squirrel's little sister down to the garage to see it. It's good to have an adorable girl like you around he said to her earlier, down by the pool. She smiled and some of her shyness fell away. This was an answer he understood.