Robin looked ready to lay into them for scaring the creature off. But he merely sighed at giving away such a valuable secret. He caught my eye and tipped his head, down the street toward our escape route. He didn’t talk again until we were out of earshot.
The great horned owl’s conservation rating is “Least Concern.” How stupid is that? Like: unless they’re all dead, we shouldn’t be concerned.
Even his anger seemed bountiful. I draped my arm across his shoulders. “How did you happen to find him?”
Easy. I just looked.
THE DAYS GREW SHORTER and summer ran its course. One night in mid-August, he asked for a planet before bed. I gave him the planet Chromat. It had nine moons and two suns, one small and red, the other large and blue. That made for three kinds of day of different lengths, four kinds of sunset and sunrise, scores of different eclipses, and countless flavors of dusk and night. Dust in the atmosphere turned the two kinds of sunlight into swirling watercolors. The languages of that world had as many as two hundred words for sadness and three hundred for joy, depending on the latitude and hemisphere.
He was thoughtful, at the story’s end. He lay back on his pillow, hands clasped behind his head, looking up at the idea of Chromat on his bedroom ceiling.
Dad? I think I’m done with school.
His words collapsed me. “Robbie. We can’t start this again.”
What about homeschooling? He seemed to be reasoning with someone on the roof.
“I have a full-time job.”
As a teacher, right?
He was calm as a skiff on a windless pond. I was capsizing. I wanted to shout, Give me one good reason why you can’t sit in a classroom like every other child your age. But I already knew several.
Eddie Tresh is homeschooled, and his parents work. It’s easy, Dad. We just fill in a form and tell Wisconsin that you’re going to do it. We can get some course packets and stuff online, if we want. You wouldn’t have to spend any time on me at all.
“Robbie, that’s not the problem.”
He turned to look at me and waited for my objections. When none came, he rolled over on one elbow and retrieved a battered paperback from his little student desk next to the bed. He handed me the volume: Aly’s old field guide to the birds of the eastern U.S.
“Where did you get this?” My tone made even me flinch. I seemed to want to criminalize my son. He got it off the bookshelf in my bedroom—where else?
I can learn by myself, Dad. Give me the name, and I’ll tell you what it looks like.
I flipped through the book, now filled with tiny checkmarks next to the species he knew. One of his parents was already homeschooling him.
I want to be an ornithologist. They don’t teach you that in the fourth grade.
The field guide felt as heavy as it would have on Jupiter. “School prepares you for a lot more than just your job.” He looked at me, concerned for how lame and tired I sounded. I fumbled my fingers into the hashtag sign he’d taught me. “Life skills, Robbie. Like learning how to get along with other kids.”
If it really taught kids that, I wouldn’t mind going. He scooched over on the bed and consoled my shoulder. Here’s how I look at it, Dad. I’m almost ten. You want me to learn everything I need for being an adult. So school should teach me how to survive the world ten years from now. So . . . what do you think that’ll look like?
The noose tightened, and I couldn’t slip it. He must have learned the argument from all those Inga Alder videos.
Really. I need to know.
Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.
Tell me what you think, Dad. Because that’s what I should be learning.
I didn’t need to say anything out loud. With his newly learned powers, Robbie had only to look in my eyes, move and enlarge his inner dot, and read my mind.
Remember how Pawpaw just kept getting sicker and sicker and wouldn’t go to the doctor, and then he died?
“I remember.”
That’s what everybody’s doing.
I didn’t much want to remember my father. Nor did I want to discuss bottomless catastrophe with my nine-year-old. The house was peaceful and the night was calm. I fingered Aly’s book, with its dozens of new checkmarks.
“Bachman’s warbler.”
Bachman’s warbler, he repeated, as if in a spelling bee. Male? Black cap, fading to gray. Green body, yellow belly, white under the tail.