Bewilderment

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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?

Dad, Dad, Dad: Can we mail it tonight?

He’d worked for way too long for me to argue with this rush to the finish line. We took the money to the bank. I wrote a check to send off to the conservation organization he’d chosen after hours of agonizing. That night, after plant-based burgers and a couple of Inga videos, we lay reading on opposite ends of the sofa, our feet launching little border wars into the space between us. He closed his book and studied the beaded ceiling.

I feel great, Dad. Like I could die now and be pretty happy with how things went.

“Don’t.”

Uh, oh-kee, he said, in his clown voice.

Two weeks later, he got a letter from his not-for-profit saviors of choice. I put it on the front table for him to find when he came home from school. He opened it in high excitement, tearing the envelope. The letter thanked him for his contribution. It bragged about the fact that almost seventy cents on every dollar went directly or indirectly toward slowing the rate of habitat destruction in ten different countries. It suggested that if he wanted to donate another two thousand five hundred dollars, now was a good time, because matching funds and favorable exchange rates put them within reach of their quarterly fundraising goal.

Matching funds?

“That’s when big donors give a dollar for every dollar someone else gives.”

They have the money… but they won’t give it unless…?

“It’s incentive. Like your two-for-one deals, at the farmers’ market.”

That’s different. Evil thoughts curdled his forehead. They have the money, but they keep it back? And only seven hundred of my dollars goes to the animals? Species are dying, Dad. Thousands!

He shouted at me, hands flailing. I suggested dinner, but he refused. He went to his room, slammed his door, and wouldn’t come out, even to play his favorite board game. I listened for crashing, but the silence was scarier. I sneaked outside and peeked in his window. He was lying in bed, scribbling into a notebook. Plans everywhere.

Fourteen months earlier, he’d punched his bedroom door and fractured two bones in his hand because I’d accidentally thrown away a trading card of his. Now, faced with this crushing thank-you letter, he was concentrating himself, writing out some secret set of action points. For that remarkable metamorphosis, I had Martin Currier’s neural feedback training to thank. Somehow, though, standing outside in the chilly spring wind while the maples showered me with red flowers, I wasn’t sure Thankful was the emotion on Marty’s ambiguous color wheel that best matched what I was feeling.

Right before bedtime, Robin came out of his room. He waved a handful of handwritten notes at me. Can we apply for a protest permit?

Little yellow warning triangles filled my head. “What are we protesting?”

He shot me a look so filled with disdain that I felt like his disappointing child. By way of answer, he held out a sheet of eleven-by-seventeen drawing paper, his sketch for a larger placard. In the middle of the rectangular landscape were the words:

In a ring around these words ran a cartoon bestiary of soon-to-vanish plants and animals. My pride in his skill was offset by my dismay at the slogan.

“Is the protest going to be… just you?”

You’re saying it’s no good?

“No, I’m not saying that. It’s just that protests usually work better when you join with other people.”

Do you know any protests I can join? My head dipped. He touched my wrist. I need to start somewhere, Dad. Maybe it’ll inspire other people.

“Where do you want to protest?”

His lips pinched and he shook his head. The man who’d watched all those Inga Alder videos with him—the man who’d married his mother—demeaned himself with such a question.

Duh. At the Capitol.