Of Bubbles and Boys, Both Growing and Grown

Ihave a friend named Jeffrey who is 8 years old and feeling a little peeved by the presence of a new baby in the house.

Up until the birth of his little brother a couple of months ago, Jeff was the baby, more or less, and occupied the position with a kind of grandeur fit for a king. A little king.

Now the attention that was once his is being focused on the new guy, who doesn’t really replace Jeffrey but who is a family presence that cannot be denied. Babies require a lot of notice, if you know what I mean. They want it here, and they want it now. Or they scream their tiny faces off.

To say Jeffrey is peeved is not meant to imply that he doesn’t love his little brother. He does. But he’s feeling something that he can’t explain. It has to do with the baby, true, but also with something else. He’s growing up.

This is not an easy thing to do. The arms that embraced him in infancy are loosening a little, as loosen they must, when the days stretch to months and the months to years.

The process began when he headed off to school for the first time, glancing back at infancy, and gradually intensified as he tested the world that was opening to him. Embraces loosen to allow the freedom that growing up provides.

And now this.

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Idecided he needed a special day, a day all his own, to soothe the transition from new baby to growing boy. So I took him to the Santa Monica Pier, my favorite place of transition.

The ocean was especially dazzling that day. The long, warm rays of a late afternoon sun lay a shimmery silver pathway on the water from the horizon to the beach. The surf broke into foamy patterns of lines and circles that formed and reformed on the sand, its lacy geometry altering with the ocean’s surge.

“It’s a long trail,” Jeffrey said, peering toward the far distance, where the silver path ended. “Where does it go?”

“It goes to where the wind blows perfume and cats whisper to each other,” I said.

Jeffrey looked at me as though I’d lost my marbles and nodded. Here was the old guy telling stories again. Where cats whisper to each other indeed. But they do. He’ll know these things someday as the seasons whistles by. And he’ll tell his own little friends about talking cats and singing dogs and other things you learn about when imagination begins wandering to distant places.

“Look!” he said suddenly pointing.

A small, battery-powered machine, left unattended, was blowing masses of bubbles into the warm air. They were small, round prisms of light and color that gleamed with iridescent rainbows as they floated down the pier.

Jeffrey ran to them, standing at first as the bubbles sailed over him and into him, bursting into fine, showery sprays, and then leaping and dancing to catch them, as one leaps to catch fairies and fantasies.

*

His was a dance that unicorns dance when they romp through fields of strawberry dreams and Popsicle trees. It’s a fleeting jump and a spin that decorates the very air it occupies and then is gone, like pieces of memory that lose their color overnight.

Things change in an instant. The sun descends into the distant horizon, and the silver trail shimmers off into the flat, dim glow that precedes twilight. The surf pulls back, leaving a final trace of its earlier existence on the wet sand.

But still Jeffrey dances the unicorn dance, joined by other boys and girls who prance like sun sprites on the hard deck of the pier. And then it’s over. As quickly as infancy fades to childhood, the afternoon has deepened into evening.

The bubble machine is shut down and all the little sun sprites leave in different directions.

As we walk up the pier to the game room, Jeffrey’s small hand in mine, I wonder how it would be to dance just one more time in a world of splashing bubbles. Would the strawberry dreams still be there? The Popsicle trees?

“Next time, I’m going to dance with the bubbles,” I say. Jeffrey laughs. “You’re too old, Grandpa,” he says. Then, “I don’t mean to say you’re that old, you’re just too old for bubbles.”

I guess that’s true. But I’m not too old to write about unicorns prancing against a lemonade sky, singing songs of flutes and drums. I don’t mention that to Jeffrey. It is enough just to hold his hand and to remember the dance as we walk together into the land where cats whisper and the wind blows perfume into the warm spring air.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at al.martinez@latimes.com.