One of my wife's old friends from Romania stopped by last summer for a visit. My five-year-old son, Tristan, took an instant liking to her, even though she is 25 years his senior, and in the daylong process that followed, he taught us all some valuable lessons about love.
Love has signs and symptoms, and to a five year old these symptoms progress more rapidly than what we as adults are used to, for the effects of time are more intense the younger you get. For a 5-year-old child the month of June represents 2% of his entire life. A day means something to a child. It's not merely one of an endless series of workdays just as forgettable as any other, but a chapter in one's life.
When you're five years old, love at first sight is the only kind of love at all.
And for Tristan, Love, Chapter One ended pretty tragically. His name is Tristan, after all.
The first symptom was the inordinate, lap dog attention paid to my wife's friend, Alina. And not just the endless stream of 'you're cute' and 'you're nice', but the wide eyed staring from a creature two feet below, perfected by puppies and enamored five year old boys. If it's true that men are dogs, then I can see how it all starts out watching Tristan wag his invisible tail of affection.
The second symptom was the sheer volume of his affection. I now realize by observing my son's louder and louder attempts to grab Alina's ear and eye that true love isn't characterized by soft gentle whispers in the ear, but by piercing, startling yelps for attention.
It's true. I told my wife this and she agreed.
"Dis eez vy I yell at you to vash the dishes. Eet's because I love you more than you love me. Please vash the dishes."
The final symptom is irrationality. When Alina told Tristan that she would be going home that evening he asked her where her home was. When she told him 'Chicago', he went to my wife right then and there and asked her to make him a sandwich, for as he announced to the world, he was headed to Chicago.
Well, maybe to a five year old all you need before leaving home for good to live with your beloved is for your mom to pack you a lunch.
"Are you sure? Just a sandwich? Don't you need a change of clothes? Your blanket? Some pull-ups?"
"No, just a sandwich."
"All he needed was a sandwich." So help me if that wouldn’t make a fine title for a romance novel.
And Tristan also taught me that the younger you are, the more intense, and consequently, the shorter lasting are the effects of love. As soon as my son realized Alina was leaving, he burst into uncontrollable sobbing. Not mild whimpering or even plaintive tears, but full-blown, snot-out-your-nose, screams-to-the-heavens, arms-striking-the-ground-like-a-drum wailing. A love tantrum. Even Romeo didn't love Juliet like that.
When she tried to leave, my love stricken son ran into her car, locked the doors, and put on his seat belt. Quite irrational.
It was a great source of personal parental pride, however, that he remembered to buckle himself into the back seat (We have airbags).
Soon, we were able to bribe him out with money, and dragged him kicking and unwilling into the house, where he promptly ran to his bedroom and appealed achingly through the window for the now fading rental car to stop and turn around.
This of course makes me realize that there are no limits to the analogy one can draw between how a child loves and how adults behave.
But shortly thereafter, and this was a lesson not lost on me, Tristan let Alina go, his tears dried and he went about his business of playing with his toys, tickling his baby sister and tormenting our two dogs. A week later, he still remembered her, and I passed on to him the wisdom passed down to me through generations:
"If you have the gift of remembering someone, it’s not so much that they’re special, but that you are."
He smiled, accepting the compliment and seemingly moving on with his life, some 2000 miles away from his first love in Chicago.
But just to be sure, we’ve hidden the car keys and the road atlas. You know how fast kids grow up these days.
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