The doorbell rings. My two-year-old thunders excitedly from the kitchen through the dining room to the front hall in his trademark run-everywhere-all-the-time style. He can only have one expectation: it’s got to be the brown truck with a delivery. Who else comes to the front door?
In fact it’s not UPS at the door. But we’ll get to that.
My son is too young to have friends calling on him. Although kids today are too cool to do anything as desperate as asking if you can come out and play. The protocol seems to be that one kid comes out of his garage or back door and starts shooting hoops, or flying a radio-controlled helicopter, or swinging a Wiffle ball bat, and hopes the noise or color or motion attracts like-minded tykes.
Over short periods kids multiply, like cells splitting: one, two, four, eight. There is no apparent organization or agenda, no clearly set goals or continuity from day to day. After 15 minutes or an hour they dwindle, for no obvious reason, until there are four, two, one, none.
My eye, admittedly, is not practiced. I have not been a parent for long. But so far, this is what I perceive: the kids on my block are more or less commodities to one another. It’s not evident that there are individual relationships among them. Today they play with A, B and F; tomorrow C, D and E. What the difference is, even they don’t seem to know.
We probably weren’t any more sophisticated when we were kids. We felt like we were bonding, or we feel that way in retrospect because it’s the friend bonds that we still remember.
So when the doorbell rang, and The Boy barreled through the house toward the noise, I followed. I opened the door. There was no package left behind by UPS. But there was a boy, who looked about 8 but was wearing a middle school T-shirt.
This cognitive dissonance did not serve me well. As I tried to size up the situation — who was he, where did he come from, and what did he want? — I got hung up on the fact that he didn’t look anywhere near a sixth grader’s age. The processing power it took to try to make sense of this, crucially, slowed my faculties.
He looked pleasant. He smiled nervously and asked if I wanted to buy a raffle ticket for a free iPad. His mom waited patiently, or maybe not entirely patiently, on the sidewalk.
Understand that someone had just won a huge Powerball jackpot, $590 million. Understand that the winning ticket was sold at the supermarket in Florida nearest to where my parents live, but they had not been the ones to purchase said ticket. The odds are horrific if you play the lottery; statistically speaking, buying a ticket does not meaningfully improve your chance of winning.
Win an iPad? I never win anything. I have never won anything, not ever. In no drawing of any kind have I even finished second. At no golf outing have I ever walked away with a lovely parting gift. Wait, I take that back: one time I won a right-handed 3-wood. I am left handed. “Can I exchange this for a left-handed model?” I asked the emcee. “That’s what the store gave us,” he said. “That’s what you get.”
He told me a store that had donated the club. I called them, asked if I could exchange my righty club for a lefty. “They don’t even make that club for lefties,” the clerk said, as if the very idea were ridiculous.
In that Powerball drawing the chance of winning was said to be 175,000,000 to 1; I type out the full number so you can see it in all its ferocity. While I thought about that, our visitor stood on the porch with a stack of golden tickets in his hands. “$5,” I could see they read on their faces.
“No thank you,” I smiled. “We already have one.” Which is true, we do. Not that there’s no earthly way a family of three could use a second iPad.
“OK,” said the boy at the door, at which point I immediately started to feel bad. He, on the other hand, seemed relieved, which only made me feel worse.
What had I done? Karmically? I saw the mom’s eyes narrow in disgust. Just wait ’til your son is selling candy for his Little League, the wrinkles on her brow seemed to say. That day is coming; we both know that, and you are screwed.
It began to occur to me that this might not just be some kid from some street in the general vicinity. He was Indian; our next-door neighbors are Indian. They have boys about his age. I’ve never met the mother, so wouldn’t have any way of recognizing her. I haven’t seen the kids up close enough to know them by sight, but that would explain why he seemed so cool with my rejection. I had been his first attempt to make a sale. I said no, but I hadn’t bit his head off or anything. He was going to be all right. He was going to make it.
After I shut the door, I tried to soothe myself with some rationalization. I didn’t know that kid. If he is my next-door neighbor, he really shouldn’t be a stranger to me. After all, he plays on my lawn.
Of course, these are just kids, and they’re not supposed to be effective networkers. The burden is on me as well as them to make a connection, to be more than a commodity.
Next time, if I don’t recognize the child at my door, I’ll ask him who he is and where he’s from, and why he’s come by today. I’ll buy the ticket, of course I will. But I’ll also do my part to forge a connection, to present myself as more than a walking wallet.
Or I could have let my son answer the door. “I buy iPad,” being the sort of thing he might say. The Boy knows the right thing to do.
