The journalist asked, “Aren’t they enrolled in school? Don’t they have classes?”
The oval-faced girl in tight pigtails blew a raspberry. She didn’t look fourteen. She barely looked eleven. But she spoke English better than most of Robin’s classmates. “My house is burning down. Do you want me to wait until the school bell rings before I rush home to put it out?”
The journalist plunged on. “Speaking of school, how do you answer the American President when he says you should study economics before telling world leaders what to do?”
“Does economics teach you to shit your nest and throw away all the eggs?”
My pale, odd son drifted from the dining room and stood at my side. Who is that? He sounded hypnotized.
The interviewer asked, “Do you think there’s any chance this protest might succeed?”
She’s like me, Dad.
My scalp burned. I recalled why Inga Alder sounded ever so slightly otherworldly. She’d once called her autism her special asset—“my microscope, telescope, and laser, put together.” She’d suffered from deep depression and had even tried to take her own life. Then she found meaning in this living planet.
She cocked an eye at the bemused journalist. “I know our chance of failure if we do nothing.”
That’s what I’m saying! Exactly!
Robin twitched so hard I reached out to calm him. He pulled away. He had no use for calm. I don’t know why it felt so painful and bottomless, to be sitting three feet away at the moment my son first fell in love.
HE ASKED FOR INGA ALDER as he once begged for videos of his mother. We watched the girl march and carry banners. We followed her posts. We sat through documentaries where she made honest commonplaces sound like urgent revelations. We saw her take over the little Tuscan hill town where the G7 met. We watched her tell the assembled UN how history would remember them, if there was a history.
Robin fell hard, as only a nine-year-old can fall for an older woman. But his was that rare love—pure gratitude untroubled by need or desire. In one go, Inga Alder opened my son’s feedback-primed mind to a truth I myself never quite grasped: the world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.
Late April brought the first outdoor farmers’ market of the year. We went down to the big square across from the Capitol. It felt like his mother was with us, just across the street. The stalls were few and the pickings slim. But there were lemony goat cheese and the last of last fall’s apples and potatoes. There were carrots, kale, spinach, green garlic, and people glad that the land had come alive again. The Amish brought cakes and cookies of all colors and creeds. There were food trucks with cuisine from every continent. There were hand-built ceramics and scrap-metal jewelry and mandolin-saxophone duets, lathed bowls made from windfall oaks, marbleized shot glasses, and handsaws enameled with local landscapes. There were hanging ivy, flame flower, and spider plants. In the outer rim of that solar system were the fundraisers, community radio people, and public service folks. Alongside these was one fully fee-paid booth where customers could take their pick of one hundred and thirty-six wild pen-and-ink watercolors of creatures about to be relegated to memory.
Over the course of five hours, Robin became someone else. Maybe it was the trillion dollars of advertising that rained down each year, teaching children how to confuse themselves with stuff. Every nine-year-old Earthling has long since learned how to pitch a sale. But I never imagined how cunning Robin could be at it, or how good. So good that for an entire Saturday, he passed for a native of this planet.
He reinvented every borderline-shyster trick in the traveling salesman’s book. What do you think would be a good price? I spent hours making that one! The golden-crowned sifaka matches your eyes. Nobody wants the thicklip pupfish; I don’t know why. He accosted gray-haired ladies from twenty yards away. Help keep a beautiful creature alive, ma’am? Best few dollars you’ll ever spend.
People bought because he made them laugh. Several got a kick out of the salesman routine or wanted to reward a budding entrepreneur. Some took pity on him; others just wanted to assuage their guilt. Maybe someone among the hundred purchasers even liked the art well enough to hang it on her walls. But most people who stopped and bought were simply patronizing a child who’d spent months making things of little value on lots of misplaced hope.
In six hours, he made nine hundred and eighty-eight dollars. The guy who took our booth fee bought the black-chested spiny-tailed iguana—not Robin’s most successful effort—for twelve bucks to make the grand total an even thousand. Robin was beside himself. Months of single-minded work had led to triumph. Any sum with that many zeroes in it was indistinguishable from a fortune. Who knew what such an amount might do?