A Fist Full of Lucky
Posted on January 30, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, career, juvenile deliquents |
As a parent to young children, I occasionally catch a glimpse of the person each child might become in adulthood. Usually it’s sort of a quiet moment of recognition. O on his first birthday spent the entire afternoon emptying the cooler of ice. He fished around in the chilly depths of frigidity for every last cube, shoveling them out onto the floor and sliding around in the melt water. As his mother, I was okay with this focused activity. It was cheaper than hiring a clown and an interest in cold water indicated any number of acceptable future careers: bartender, deep sea fisherman, Navy Seal.
After the age of two, O’s focus turned from cooler spelunking to waste management. There was not a garbage can in the house that the kid did not overturn, pilfering through the contents at least a dozen times before noon each day. And then, as he grew older and wiser, he developed a keen affinity for the grappling truck. Each week an enormous vehicle equipped with a crane and hook would drive the streets of our hometown picking up yard clippings and trash and old appliances that otherwise civilized residents would discard in trash-pits on the front lawn. The sheer size of the thing was captivating with the stilted, blundering movements of the hook fishing for curbside debris. O insisted he was going to be grapple hook-truck driver one day. I smiled patiently and secretly willed it to be otherwise. Navy Seal - dangerous but respectable. Garbage truck driver - I’ve got nothing.
With G, it’s been a harder read. She’s difficult to pin down. She’s sort of passingly interested in a whole variety of things - art, candy, soccer, making candy, The Red Sox, eating candy, finding vending machines with candy, searching for loose pieces of candy in purses and in street gutters along parade routes. Perhaps she’ll be a chocolatier or purveyor of rare and unusual jelly beans. Suits me fine. I’m a candyoholic myself though I would never stoop to sample old candy strewn on sidewalks and in parking lots (really, I wouldn’t).
But just the other night, G discovered a new talent that, quite like candy hunting, is frighteningly addictive. It was Friday night, game night and the four of us gathered around to play Yahtzee, the game of dice, roll ‘em and weep and so on. There’ s a lot of trash talking during our family game-athons and I was feeling lucky until little G began throwing the bones. She just couldn’t miss. She’d be rolling for a full house and a full house it would be. She’d gun for a large straight and the dice would fall obligingly. I could tell she was really getting her groove on when she shouted, “This game makes me feel OUTRAGEOUS!” She actually threw two Yahtzees that night (one Yahtzee being the Holy Grail, two Yahtzees being astonishingly, statistic-defyingly HOLY SHIT SHE’S THROWN ANOTHER YAHTZEE AND GET THAT CHILD A SCRATCH AND WIN TICKET KIND OF LUCKY!!!!) G has found her calling. She is a gambler. She blows on the dice. She taps her left shoulder twice, chants a little lucky song and chucks a fist full of dice for the win. All the while she wears the grin of someone supremely above the law of averages. This weekend we’ll begin our poker training and come spring - it’s Vegas.
They have waste management opportunities in Vegas, right? Because O will need something to do while G holds forth at the Bellagio.
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