Signs

We're on the verge-- the Very Brink-- of teenager-hood over here. I can hardly believe it. Will's thirteenth birthday is next month, and I find myself looking for signs....

For the most part, Will isn't showing many. I mean, the personality change that parents sometimes groan about hasn't emerged. He's still his joyful, delightful self. Case in point: over the last months a contest has emerged: he's aiming-- over the course of his life-- to kiss me more times than I kiss him, and I've explained that, given his failure to kiss me for the better part of his first eighteen months or so, and given that I gave him Ever So Many kisses during that time (and since then), he is Hopelessly Behind. So now he tries to kiss me where I have no hope of getting him back: on the back of my neck, on the tip of my nose-- places where I cannot simultaneously reach him at all. Still, I tell him, it's hopeless.

Yet he has become quite the texter, I will say-- a form of communication for which I have (almost) complete disdain as it fails to be genuinely relational (and in taking this stance I realize that I have rendered myself among the Ancient). Last week, with the use of this texting medium, he arranged for he and some friends (one of them is a Girl) to go bowling. That seems pretty teenager-ish to me.

The Smart Mouth (thankfully) hasn't really emerged, but at its threat we are quick to Correct and he is (Sweet Boy) quick to apologize.

But the forgetfulness, well, that's been around for awhile. During sixth and seventh grades he lost or forgot necessary binders countless times, both at home and at school. He also forgot his lunch, his guitar, his soccer clothes. This was irritating for all of us, but as a symptom of adolescence it hasn't been a big deal.

Nonetheless, when he was headed last week to King's Dominion with the youth group and asked to borrow my Bible (my lovely, leather-bound, slender, received-for-my-last-birthday Bible), I was hesitant to let him take it. (Doesn't he have one of his own, Bill asked? And yes, he does, but it's a "Kid's Bible," so I'm guessing it wouldn't do for a youth group trip (another Sign)). Still, this was my Son, asking for my Bible. How could I say no? So I told him: Please, please Will, don't lose this. Don't forget it where you are staying, or in somebody's van. Bring it Home.

He'd been home for a day or two when I realized the Bible hadn't re-surfaced. My question (Will, where's my Bible?) was met, at first, with silence-- a silence I dreaded. And then he says: "I think it's in the laundry."

???

"I haven't done any laundry," I said.

"Oh," he said. A little more silence. And then, "I guess it's in the laundry hamper," he said. "I just opened my bag and dumped all the clothes in there, and your Bible was at the bottom of the bag. I guess I forgot it was there."

Oh. The laundry hamper. Didn't think to look there, I guess. But I found it, just where he said it would be.

At least he brought it home.