FRESH YARN presents: Little Blue Boy ... by Martha Randolph Carr

FRESH YARN presents:

Little Blue Boy
By Martha Randolph Carr

"He looks like one of the Blue Men, you know, from the Revolution."

Leave it to Dad to come up with an historical reference.

My small son, Louie, was three years old and standing at the front door clad in only his underwear, completely covered in an aqua blue coating. He had figured out his big, fat sticks of chalk dissolved in puddles. I was impressed with his attention to detail; even his eyelids and the backs of his ears were blue.

I wasn't surprised he was up to something. That was life as a single mother with Louie. Thank goodness I knew he was smarter than I was. That's what made it possible to look out a window and see him on his small tricycle, legs out to the sides, whizzing down our very steep driveway, his curly hair straightened by the wind blowing past him, and not worry. Or watch him attempt to pet every living creature, sometimes getting nipped by the geese down by the lake in the process, and not worry. Eventually the geese gave in and let him pet them, and he gently stroked their heads and chatted with them. They would turn their heads slightly and look at him till he was done talking.

He did get nipped a little hard once by a garden snake and it made him mad, very mad. His three-year-old self whipped the snake into a half-knot, for which he felt instantly sorrowful and he came to get me to help untie the snake.

"What?" I asked, in the middle of vacuuming. "You did what?"

"I tied a snake in a knot and I need you to help me untie it," he said, calmly.

I turned off the vacuum, still looking at his calm expression, wondering if maybe this all meant something else and I would find something else tied in a knot. Tied a snake in a knot?

There on the front step was a long black garden snake slowly, very slowly, untying itself from a very tight half-knot.

"Help it," Louie said.

"Why did you do it?" I asked.

"It bit me," he said, offering up his hand with a small red mark; no skin was broken. "Untie it," he repeated, looking back down at the snake, which was fortunately making progress on its own.

"No, it's getting somewhere. We'll let the snake handle this one."

Louie wasn't completely satisfied and stayed to make sure before depositing the snake back in the grass. It didn't try to bite him again.

I let Louie play in the front yard of our small neighborhood without me right next to him since he was three. We live there still in our red brick rancher, on a quiet cul-de-sac surrounded on one side by a small lake, and off of two other fairly quiet streets. Louie had been trying to break out of the house since he was two, sometimes successfully. I was worn out by the time he was three.

I didn't think his little hands at two years old could get the door open, but one day some elderly neighbors were showing me pictures they had recently taken and in one of them was Louie, smiling broadly, still in his pajamas, obviously outside without my knowledge. At the time, when I thought Louie was in his room, our next door neighbor, Murray, sometimes referred to as the King of the Cul-de-Sac by our neighbor who was deteriorating from Alzheimer's, came to my door with Louie in tow. My son had quietly, stealthily snuck out and gone next door to ask Murray if he could come out and play. That's when I started dead-bolting the doors.

"We can't get out, she locked the doors," he said glumly to my oldest sister, his Aunt Diana, the surgeon, who smiled in return. That clued Louie in.

"You know where the key is?" he asked. She refused to tell him, so he went back to scheming. For months Louie would ask every guest who ventured into the house, and was then locked in, if they were ready to go, could he walk them to their car. He did this with no expression on his face leaving them to think they were unwanted. I constantly had to explain that Louie was trying to sneak outside. "It's not you, I promise," I would say.

Getting him from the car to the house was always a long process. Louie wouldn't give in for at least fifteen minutes, sometimes a half hour, every time we pulled into the driveway, even if it was late at night and he was exhausted. He was outside and he saw it as precious time and he was going to stay out there even if he had to keep shaking his head to stay awake.

So, you can see why I did what I did next. The lake behind the house was filled with tree frogs and bullfrogs and cicadas and crickets. It still is a very loud chorus in the warmer months that I find very comforting.

But I was tired and had groceries and Louie wouldn't budge, wanting to go exploring in the woods in our back yard, which meant I had to stay outside because, knowing Louie, he'd find a hollow tree and get stuck inside in the minute it would take to put the groceries down in the house.

"Do you hear that?" I said, with a touch of fear on my face. I wasn't trying to make him apoplectic so I kept it to a minimum -- enough to draw concern.

"What?" said Louie, standing up straight and trying to discern a new sound over the loud hum.
"The frogs," I said with meaning, drawing out the word and adding maybe a little more fear to my face, before turning and running into the house. Louie ran quickly behind me.

Yea, I thought, finally, something I can use.

The next day Louie was at a babysitter's while I worked at some odd job, one of the many I had while I figured out how to be a writer.

"The oddest thing happened today," said the sitter, Judy.

"What?" I said, having completely forgotten about my own cleverness.

"I was downstairs and heard Louie getting up from his nap and moving things around. I went upstairs to check on him and he had stuffed his blanket under the door and locked himself in. When I called to him through the door, all he would say is, frogs. Do you know what that means?"

I said I had no idea.

Louie had a personal relationship with the real Santa Claus who came every year to the old Thalheimer's department store in downtown Richmond. Santa entered via a chimney set up like a living room with wing-backed chairs on either side of the fireplace, the whole thing plunked down just inside the entrance to the store near the women's clothing section. His legs dangled for a moment as we heard a familiar "Ho, ho, ho" before he dropped down, bent over in the artificial fireplace. (I have no idea how they rigged it all, much less talked a senior citizen into doing it).

On the walk from the car to the magical chimney, Louie kept asking everyone we saw if we were suddenly at the North Pole. When it was his turn to see Santa, Louie handed him long letters that he had dictated to me. Santa read them out loud over a small microphone. The parents waiting in line, even Santa's helper elf, always cried while Louie sat there beaming. His list was never about what toys he hoped for, but who could use Santa's help the most that year. It was a wish list of a different kind.

Life with Louie meant he decided, at five, to climb yet another tree, the very tall pine that used to be right outside our front door, and didn't stop until he was above the roof line. Wisely, he decided to sit on a comfortable branch and wait patiently for me to come looking for him. In the meantime he would yell hello to any neighbors he saw who would turn round and round looking for him, before giving up and just yelling hello back in the general direction of his voice. Everyone knew Louie and knew he must be up to something but in the end, he would also be okay. That was life with Louie. Scary, potentially dangerous, weird, funny, sad, touching, and always turning out okay.

Standing underneath the tall pine, directing him down as I tried to gauge where to stand so I could act as a human mattress if necessary, I would repeat to myself for the umpteenth time, "He will grow up in spite of me. He will grow up in spite of me." When he got to the ground he gave himself one good shake, looked up at me with a grin and said, "You should see the view from up there!" He quickly turned and took off running to look for something else to discover.

Louie's adventures were always an odd compliment to my own adventures as an undiscovered writer, and a good reminder on the days I wanted to give up and do something sensible. Sure, that would look like the reasonable thing to do and would have made a lot of my relatives feel more comfortable, but would have drained all of the fun out of life for me and taken away the possibilities that risk can often bring.

Besides, you should see the view from here.