Starting Out When She’s Good and Ready
It’s three days until the start of kindergarten, and I’m preparing the little red-haired girl for her entry into the outside world.
“You know, everybody thinks the other guy married into more money than they did,” I say. “And you know what? I think it’s usually true.”
But the little red-haired girl says nothing. No nod. No smile. Nothing. She doesn’t even offer me a slice of the orange she’s eating, which is what I’d really like.
I guess that’s L.A. for you. So much sunshine, so little warmth. Even from the ones you love.
A minute later, a tiny hand reaches across the picnic blanket and hands me a slice of the orange.
“Thanks, baby,” I tell the little red-haired girl.
Can I leave a nice moment like this alone? Fat chance.
“Now when you get to kindergarten, don’t put your mouth on the drinking fountain,” I tell her, heaping on more advice. “That’s like kissing people you don’t even know.”
“Sure, Dad,” she says with a giggle. The little red-haired girl ends every sentence with a giggle. It’s how you know she’s done talking.
Is she ready for kindergarten? Who knows. She has a backpack and a lunch kit. She has her first-day outfit all picked out. She can recite the alphabet and the Dodgers starting lineup. She can tie her shoes.
But is she ready for kindergarten?
By almost any measure, she’s a pretty typical 5-year-old. Tall as a baseball bat, she’s got hair the color of Hawaiian Punch and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. A lot of people seem to think she’s pretty adorable. Me, I haven’t really noticed.
Like a lot of 5-year-olds, she’s skinny as a tulip. Just last week, she tried on her new soccer uniform, and before she could get to the mirror, the soccer shorts slipped down to her ankles.
Her older sister, who knows a little something about fashion, explained the problem this way:
“She’s got no butt.”
“No butt?” the little red-haired girl asked.
“That’s right,” the older sister said. “How can she keep her soccer shorts up when she doesn’t even have a butt?”
“She’s butt-impaired!” screamed her 10-year-old brother, who knows a little something about butt jokes.
This led to the usual round of raucous laughter that occurs whenever the word “butt” is mentioned in our house.
“Believe me, she’ll grow into her butt,” I told them.
“When?”
“When she’s good and ready,” I said.
“She’s butt-impaired!” screamed her brother again, just in case someone on a distant planet didn’t hear him the first time.
The little red-haired girl handled the situation as well as possible.
She giggled.
Is she ready for kindergarten? I asked her preschool teacher this question last spring.
“Kindergarten?” the teacher answered. “She’s ready for college.”
Yeah, but I didn’t mean that stuff. I didn’t mean the counting and the little bit of reading. I meant the other stuff. The stuff that happens outside the classroom. The bully stuff. The taunting on the playground. The looting of lunch kits. That stuff.
“First-graders like to pick on kindergartners,” the little red-haired girl says, as if reading my mind. “But I don’t care.”
“Why not?”
“Because my brother is in the fifth grade,” she says. “He could crush a first-grader.”
She chomps down on the last piece of orange. The juice squirts me in the side of the head.
“Sorry,” she says, then giggles.
*
Three more days. In three more days, she’s not really ours anymore. She belongs to the village. In three days, she’ll be subjected to all the bad words and nasty habits known by all the other little villagers.
Not that she’ll soak them up necessarily. Just because her older brother and sister did doesn’t mean she will. Maybe she will be above that. Maybe pigs will fly.
“You ready for kindergarten?” I ask.
She shrugs and rests her head on my shoulder. The sunlight is fading and so is she. She stretches her legs out over the picnic blanket and slips her thumb into her mouth. Jeez, she still sucks her thumb. How can she be ready for kindergarten?
I watch her face. She seems smaller than ever. She seems smaller by the moment.
We notice a tiny brown ant crawling up her shoe. The ant crosses her sock and heads for a teardrop of orange juice on her knee.
“Look at that stupid ant,” she says.
“How do you know it’s stupid?” I ask. “Maybe it’s a smart ant.”
She reaches down and smacks the ant, crushing it with her palm.
“Stupid ant,” she says with a giggle.
She’s ready for kindergarten.
